Essentials: Tools for Setting & Achieving Goals | Dr. Emily Balcetis

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science based tools for mental health, physical health and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now for my discussion with Dr. Emily Balcetis. Well, thanks for being here.

0:00

It's my pleasure.

0:22

Yeah, I've been looking forward to this for a long time because as a vision scientist who is also very interested in real life tools and goal setting and motivation, your work lands squarely in the middle of those interests. Just to kick things off could tell us just a little bit about goal setting and goal retrieval. What's the deal with vision and motivation? How do those two things link up?

0:23

Totally. When psychologists ask people like, how are you? What are you doing to help make progress on your goals? They say all kinds of things. A couple of things always pop to the top, which is self pep talks, or I remind myself of how important it is to do this job or put up post it notes around to constantly be nagging me about what I need to do. All of that takes a lot of time and effort and commitment. And so what a surprise that people burn out, right? It's exciting to work on a goal when you first set it. You might make some initial progress, but then eventually we get not even to the halfway point before things get real, things are challenging and we fall by the wayside. So then I, you know, with my team, I was trying to think of like, well, what are strategies that don't require as much effort that we can automate, that we can take advantage of what's already happening within ourselves, within our body, within our mind that might overcome one of those challenges. And that's when we started to land on the idea of vision. And we thought, you know what, there are strategies that we can use to look at the world in a different way and that we can automate that might help us to overcome some obstacles, to make progress on our goals, to maybe literally see opportunities that we hadn't been able to see before.

0:47

You've published a number of studies in this area, but maybe you could highlight some of the more important findings in the area of how people can adjust their vision in order to meet goals more quickly and more efficiently.

1:56

So, you know, we started thinking about what are the goals that are most important to people, that they struggle with the most important. And regardless of where you look or who you ask or when you ask it, people's number one goal Is something related to their health, right? So one of the first things that I did was go over to Brooklyn. There's a couple armories all around the boroughs here, around New York City. And the one in Brooklyn in particular is now ymca. Somebody had invited me, a physical therapist said, hey, you should come out and check out what's happening here. With your interest in exercise and trying to find new ways of helping people, new tactics that they can add to their tool belt, I think you're gonna find some interesting people that are working out there who, as it turns, are some of the fastest runners in the world. Like, you know, one of the people that was in the last Olympics before I showed up, won the gold medal for the 400 meter. I thought, when these people are running, I bet they are, like, hyper aware of everything that's going on in their surroundings. Where are they relative to the competition, what's happening in their peripheral vision, what's going on on the side, who's behind them, who's in front of them. They probably have this master sense, this master visual plan at any point in time, and that's what probably makes them elite. So when I started asking them, is that the case? Do you really pay attention to what's in your surroundings, what's behind you, what's on the side? They said no. All of them said no. And sometimes when I do do that, it's a mistake. So that was surprising. Totally went against my intuition about what they do that likely contributes to their success. What they said instead was that they are hyper focused. They assume this narrowed focus of attention, almost like a spotlight is shining on a target. Now, when they're running a short distance, that target might literally be the finish line, the line that they're trying to cross. If it's a longer distance, they set sub goals, like, you know, the person, the shorts on, the person up ahead that they're trying to beat. Or they choose some sort of stable landmark, like a sign that they would pass by, like a spotlight is shining just on that, or like they have blinders on the sides of their face. That's all they're paying attention to. And I thought, oh, that's something we can play with, right? Like, they are elite and they are accomplished. So then we started thinking, like, okay, what about people who aren't competitive runners? Is this a tactic we can teach people? The answer is yes. You can tell people about what these Olympic athletes are doing. Imagine that there's a spotlight shining just on a target. Choose something up ahead. The stop sign two blocks up that you can just see and imagine that you have blinders on so that you're not really paying attention to the people that are passing by or the buildings or the garbage cans or the trucks that are on the road. You know, tune those out and focus in on that target until you hit it. And then choose another one, right? Sort of recalibrate, choose the next goal. Now, one of the first studies that we did was teach that strategy and juxtapose or compare it against a group that we said, just look around naturally. You know, you might see that finish line up ahead, and there's things on the periphery. Whatever your eyes want to do, whatever you think is going to work best, feel free to do that and tell us what you're looking at. Then we gave them a finish line. We created sort of, you know, an exercise that's moderately challenging but possible. We put ankle weights on that accounted for about 15% of their body weight, told them to lift their knees up, sort of high, stepping to a finish line. So this would be challenging for them to do. But we said it's an indicator of overall health and fitness. Some of these people had narrowed their focus of attention, and some were just looking more expansively or naturally. And what we found is that those people that we trained, just everyday normal people doing this, this moderately challenging exercise, they were able to move 27% faster, they could do the exercise more quickly, and they said it hurt 17% less. Everybody was in the same sort of circumstance, but yet their experience was really different. So we were really excited about that, right, because it meant that this strategy, we could use it on people who are not elite athletes. It could be easily adopted. A quick training session can teach people to look at the world in a different way. Again, this narrowed attention was different than whatever they do naturally, the comparison group, but it had a big outcome. It had a big difference on the way that they were engaged in the exercise.

2:09

Are they focusing on a specific point or is it kind of the entire horizon of that goal? Because the finish line is indeed a line.

6:12

In our interviews with people, our focus group studies, it seems like it's more like a circular point. And that's in fact what we're teaching people, what we're training them to do. So rather than going broadly looking across a line from left to right, we are encouraging them to imagine a circle of light that's shining on some target. Now, of course, a finish line is a line, but if they're staying in their lane, if they're on a track, you can Imagine that there is a circle shining just on where in their lane they'll cross that finish line. Or if it's a stop sign, you can imagine a circle of light illuminating that. So that's what we're teaching people to use. And that's what seems to be effective, to maintain that focus rather than sort of being pulled to engage with peripheral vision. And there's some amazing people, some runners in history, like Joan Benoit Samuelson. She's one of the first female marathon competitors who has won multiple marathons. She's Canadian. I think she's won, feel free to correct me, like 10 marathons in her life. And she talks about sort of not assuming this, like this wide but narrow, wide but not deep or tall, attentional focus. She talks about like finding the shorts on somebody ahead of me and focusing on those shorts until she passes them and then resetting that goal.

6:18

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7:39

There's certainly vision science that's tied up in that very first stage of goal setting, like identifying what that goal is in the first place and taking those first steps. A lot of people's go to strategies that involve vision are vision boards or dream boards or post it notes. Right. They're creating some sort of visual representation of what it is that they want to accomplish. You know, almost like a scrapbook, collect visual icons that reflect where you want to be to motivate yourself. It's a really common tactic that's effective for identifying what you want, but it may not actually be effective for helping you to meet the goal to get the job done. So colleagues of mine at New York University have probed, well, why? Why is that? Why is just, you know, thinking about what you want in your life and sort of putting yourself vicariously into those shoes, imagining what my life will be like if I can accomplish everything on this list, why doesn't that work? Well, first of all, does it work? The answer is no. And why does it not work? Because what happens, these colleagues, Gabrielle Oettingen and her research team have found, is that going through and dreaming about or visualizing how great my life will be when I get X, Y and Z done, that is like a goal satisfied. I have identified what it is that I want. I have experienced it, even if just in an imaginary way. I've had that positive experience of thinking about how great my life is going to be when I get this thing done and they start to sort of rest on their laurels. She's actually measured systolic blood pressure and heart rate, and they found that people who do that, who go through that experience of visualizing how great my life will be when I get X, Y and z done, their systolic blood pressure, the bottom number on your blood pressure reading, decreases. Now I'm all about finding ways to relax. But motivation scientists know that systolic blood pressure is actually an indicator of our body's readiness to get up and act, to do something. Now, that can be the going out for a walk, going out for a run, hitting the gym. It can also be things like doing math problems, right? Even if it's something that's Just mental systolic blood pressure actually goes up in anticipation of your body or your mind needing to do something, taking the first steps on a goal. So then it helps us to understand of like, okay, if I've just created this dream board, this vision board, and put myself psychologically in that space of a goal satisfied, why is it bad that blood pressure goes down? Because it means your body is chilling out. It's like, all right, cool, I just accomplished something pretty major. I actually now don't have the physiological resources at the ready to take the first step right now to do something about that. That was a pretty monumental finding for motivation scientists to understand that creating these dream boards, these vision boards, or to do lists might actually backfire because it in and of itself is the creation of a goal and the satisfaction of the goal. And then people understandably give themselves some time to just enjoy that positive experience.

9:28

Everything you're saying again is consistent. What we know about the physiology of dopamine circuits for motivation. I have a good friend who, perhaps incidentally, perhaps not, is a cardiologist at a major university, said that one of the major errors that people make with book writing and completion is they will tell people they're going to write a book and people will say, oh, you definitely should write a book, everyone's going to love your book, and they never end up writing it. And his theory is that they get so much dopamine reward from that immediate feedback, with all the protection of never having the book criticized, that they never write the book. I'm sure there are exceptions to this, but I guess it raises the question, what's the better strategy?

12:34

Yeah, so I'm not saying that people who enjoy dream board creation should stop what they're doing, but the process of goal setting shouldn't stop with articulating what the goal is. So at that same point that we're trying to figure out, what do we want to do? What is my vision for the future? In those planning sessions, we need to simultaneously think about a couple other things. One is how are we going to get there? So take it out of the abstract, take it out of this idyllic visual iconography and start thinking about the practical day to day. We need to break it down into more manageable goals. Not just my 10 year plan for myself, but my two week plan. What can I accomplish in the next two weeks and the two weeks after that's going to set me on the right trajectory. Plan big picture, think big picture abstractly, but then also break it down more concretely. That's probably not surprising, but it's an important aspect of the goal setting process. Then again, Gabrielle Oettingen in my department has identified a third often overlooked or underappreciated stage that has to happen in the goal setting process. And that's thinking about the obstacles that stand in your way of success and that will actually help improve motivation in the long run. And sometimes people think that that, like, is counterintuitive. You're saying, like, for if I want to increase my motivation, have more motivation than I need to think about how hard it's going to be, all the ways that I'm going to fail. Because it's like coming up with a plan B, a plan C, plan D in advance of actually experiencing that. If you were on a boat and the boat started to sink, that's not the time you want to start looking for life jackets. You already want to know where one is so you can go to it right away. And it's the same thing with goal setting, is that you want to know, what am I working towards, how am I going to get there? And if I experience this obstacle, here's what I'm going to do about it. You may never experience that obstacle, but if you do, you're probably going to be shy on time, thin on resources, maybe experiencing an anxiety that hijacks your brain so you're not functioning at that optimal level of judgment and decision making. You want to already have like the snap next step in place so you can just hop to it, right? We're not going to do our best thinking when we're in crisis mode, but we don't have to. If we have used, if we have already used our resources in advance to come up with that plan B or that plan C. Michael Phelps, incredible athlete, right? This is something that he and his coach have routinely incorporated into their, into their training. Back in 2008, he was hot for the first time on the international stage. It was the Beijing Olympics. Michael Phelps was on the brink of doing something that no one else in the history of the Olympic Games has ever done, which is win eight gold medals and a single Olympiad. At the time of this story, he had already won seven and he had just the 200 fly in front of him before he could do what no one else has ever done, win the eighth gold medal. And the fly is his thing, right? This should have been, this should have been easy, like a no brainer. He's going to win this. He's going to break Olympic history. As soon as he dove into the pool his goggles started to leak, and by the time he had done three lengths of the pool, he just had to flip around and come back to the starting line, slash, finish line, back to the edge. By the time that happened, his goggles were completely filled with water and he was swimming blind. I would have panicked. I would have sunk to the bottom of the pool. I wouldn't even have been in the pool, to be honest. I'm not a swimmer. Definitely not going to be in the Olympics. But for him, he didn't. It wasn't a moment of panic like it probably would have been for nearly every other person in that situation, because he had foreshadowed that kind of possible failure. He had imagined that obstacle hitting him in advance, and not even just imagined it, but practiced it. What will we do? He routinely practiced swimming with his goggles not fully secured on his face. His coach, notoriously would rip the goggles off of his head, smash them on the ground for maybe dramatic effect or something, so that he didn't even have any goggles possible to grab as he's, as he's in practice. So because he had foreshadowed that possibility and the solution, if my goggles start to leak, then I will do, in his case, start counting my strokes, then I'll make it through. He knew exactly how many strokes it would take from him to get from one end of the pool to the other. He started counting his strokes. He won that race, the 200 fly. He won his eighth gold medal, and he'd go on to win 15 more in his career. We might not all be swimmers, we might not all aspire to Olympic level performance, but I love that example because I think it helps demystify or give us an alternative perspective on the importance and the motivational reasons why. Thinking about obstacles in advance, thinking about the ways the two, three, four ways that your plan might go awry, is actually effective at helping us to overcome the obstacle that might otherwise lead us to throw in the towel. So I do think that there's great power in thinking about our visual experience alongside other tactics that we might use for meeting our goals.

13:16

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17:58

Yeah. So out of my lab, but also out of several other labs, there's been work looking at, looking at that relation between states of the body and visual experiences. They haven't necessarily tried to integrate the motivation science element to it, but they were looking to see the visual experiences change as a function of different states of our body. They've looked at people who experience chronic fatigue, the elderly, people who are overweight, those that are wearing heavy backpacks, and so who are sort of put into that experience of being overweight. What happens to their perceptions of the environment? Well, what they find is that distances look further to those that are overweight, chronically tired, older rather than younger, weighted down with extra baggage. Distances look farther and hills look steeper. We've done some of those studies too, where we try to give people more energy or deprive them of energy and see does that change their Perception of space. They do this a lot in medical studies. You give somebody a drug and you give somebody a placebo, a sugar pill. And then importantly, nobody really knows who's got what until you've analyzed all the data and the results are revealed that these are the people that had the drug, the active agent. Same idea in the psychological research. In this case, what we did was give people Kool Aid to drink. And for some people, that Kool Aid was sweetened with sugar, an actual caloric entity. It could give them energy. Other people drank Kool Aid sweetened with salt, Splenda. So, yeah, it's sweet, but it actually doesn't have any caloric value. You're not giving people energy. You're just giving them that experience of sweetness. Now, some people, of course, are really good at identifying, like, what's real sugar and what Splenda. But when you put it in a Kool Aid, a pretty noxious powder, it actually masked it for everybody. And nobody had any idea. We asked them to guess what they got. We tested them afterwards, and they were wrong. So nobody is able to guess with accuracy what was your drink sweetened with. Which is important because they were blind. The way that scientists use it, they didn't know what it was that they were drinking. We give them about 10 to 15 minutes for that sugar to metabolize. And we measured their circulating blood glucose levels to make sure that we had, in fact, to give in their body circulating glucose energy that they might use in the next activity. And the researcher, again, didn't know whether they had just served sugar or Splenda. Then we asked people to estimate distance. We gave some people more energy or we kept others at whatever their normal level was. What we found is that those people who didn't even know it, but who had been given more energy by drinking Kool Aid sweetened with sugar, perceived their space as more constricted. That visual illusion of proximity was induced. They felt that their finish line, again in the context of an exercise task, was closer to them. In just the same way that these other physiology labs, Vision science, physiology labs, found that people who are chronically tired, who don't feel like they have as much energy, or those that are physically weighted down and for whom moving within an environment is more costly, we could create that experience for people. We did an experimental version of that. That if you have more energy, the world looks easier. The distances to a finish line don't look as far. That was some of the experimental evidence that we had to show that people's states of Their body do impact their visual experience. Now, I'm a motivation researcher. For me, the big question is, well, what's the point of that study then? Besides just showing this connection between the body and the eyes and the visual experience, we think that that's fundamental to one of the reasons that people experience difficulty when they're exercising. When it's really harder for your body, because of its physical state, to move within a space, you might say, like, well, why don't they just go exercise? Because the world looks harder to them. Because that distance that they're supposed to walk because a doctor tells them to, or that a partner encourages them to, or a hill that they should hike up because someone told them that would be good for their health, it looks more challenging to them than it does to somebody who is in better physical health. Now, if it looks that way, if it looks harder, if it feels like it might be harder, then psychologically we know that it is. When you have set yourself up psychologically, mentally for that kind of failure experience, like, I don't know that I have the resources to get this job done, this looks really hard. You're already motivationally in a place for this task to be closer to impossible for you to put it all together, then what we know is that people whose bodies might make it more challenging for them to exercise are seeing the world in a more challenging way. And that is having these downstream motivational and psychological effects that makes it less likely for them to try to take on the task in the first place or to experience it as harder than other people would or do.

19:56

Is the solution the same, however? Meaning if these people are taught to adjust their visual goal line or to set a visual spotlight on an intermediate goal, can they overcome some of this challenge that they face simply by virtue of their skewed perception?

24:45

Yes. So in all of the studies that we have done, looking at that connection between this narrowed focus of attention and improvements in exercise, we do not find that it only works for the people who are in shape or that it backfires for people who are out of shape. It works for everybody. This is a strategy that everybody can adopt because it's just simply about what do you allocate attentional resources to, what do you ignore, and what do you focus on? And that visually induces the same kind of illusion for everybody, regardless of whether you're overweight or you're at your target weight, or if you're struggling to get there, or you've already accomplished where you want to be, that visual illusion can be induced for Everybody. And it has the same kinds of consequences.

25:03

Are there any studies looking at how adrenaline or epinephrine or any other stimulants impact motivation?

25:44

If you actually are more physiologically aroused or jazzed or whatever, amped up, or you just think you are. In our studies, we have found that they work in the same way, that it can produce the same kinds of consequences. So, and I like that because it tells us, like, you can actually change the state of your body to induce these kinds of experiences, or you can try to. You can just think that you can trick yourself. You can placebo effect yourself out and produce the same kinds of effects. I had to give up Coffee, like, 12 years ago. Not because. Not for any. I love the taste, and so decaf is my jam. But I can't drink the caffeine because it didn't actually do the thing that it does for so many other people, like, make me feel more energized and more awake. I just got sweaty and jittery and anxious and I couldn't focus. And I happen to marry the same kind of person. He also can't drink caffeine, but loves the taste of coffee. The interesting thing is that we both have to have coffee in the morning to feel like we're ready to go for the day. So it's just part of our routine or whatever to have that taste and have that sensation, to feel like I'm ready to take on the day, even though, I mean, yeah, decaf still has some caffeine in it, but we're not drinking that much of it to probably actually create a caffeinated experience in our body. But we're tricking ourselves psychologically into doing that thing that in years past used to work for us both.

25:51

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27:06

Totally. A couple years ago when I was writing the book, I also had a child. The same month that I had the opportunity to pull all this research together is the same month that my son came to be. And I started to realize I became a lot less interesting once he was around. He was fascinating, but I was changing diapers and feeding him and like that was it. People would come over like, what's up? How have you been? Like, tell me something that's going on in your life. And like all I had to talk about was this, what was boring. And I just felt like I've lost myself. I used to pride myself on the crazy adventures and problems I would get myself in. And I was a great storyteller and that all of a sudden disappeared as soon as he came into the world because he became my world. So then I started thinking like, I need to pull back some coolness and if I ever had it in the first place, but I need to be a cooler person than I'm coming across right now. So I decided I want to learn to play drums and I want to be like a one hit wonder as a rock star drummer. So that's a goal that I set for myself at the same time that my son came into this world when I was also trying to think about goal setting and how to improve my ability and all of our ability to get a job done when you're faced with some pretty big obstacles. So I got to practice all these techniques that we're talking about on myself and see for myself when I tell people, hey, try this thing like narrowed focus of attention. Does it help with something like becoming A better drummer. And the answer is, yeah, these tactics at least work for me sometimes under some circumstances, and they do for other people who try them for other goals that aren't necessarily about exercise. One that I found particularly helpful was overcoming my bad memory. That everybody's memories are faulty, right? Everybody has sort of a warped perception of the past. It might be skewed more positively than maybe we deserve, or it might be skewed more negatively. If you feel that what looms large in your mind as you reflect on something from the past are the mistakes that you've made, the things that. The social faux pas that you had or challenges that you faced at work when you got in trouble with a boss or with a colleague, if that's what really stands out in your mind or the good side of all of those possibilities, we probably aren't getting the world right. And that is something that our brain has evolved to give us a faulty memory to level and sharpen, to not encode and remember and be able to recall everything that we've experienced with accuracy and precision. And that's a problem when it comes to assessing our own goal progress. When we want to be our own accountant and try to determine, how are we doing. If I want to become a drummer, am I on track for getting there before X, before my time runs out, am I going to make it or not? And I think that's an experience, whether they want to be a drummer or not, that a lot of people can resonate with of like trying to determine, is this trajectory, is this rate of progress going to get the job done by X amount of time? Will I have my swimsuit body by summer, or will I save enough for retirement by the time I hit 65? For these goals, where time is involved and there is a deadline, we do take moments to assess our trajectory. And if we just rely on our memory, we're probably going to do a bad job of assessing the that trajectory of knowing whether we're on pace to meeting our deadline. And I found that to be the case as I was thinking about, am I actually gonna be able to learn this song? I mean, I know that it's going a lot slower than it probably would for anybody else, but to give myself a deadline and a commitment, I decided I was gonna put on a show. I was gonna invite everybody I knew and also people I didn't know, and I was gonna play my one song for them. So in the process of, like, figuring out, am I gonna be able to play this show? I sent out invitations, like, the Date is coming. Committed. Like, people are coming to listen to my one song. God bless them. How's it gonna go? And. And it felt awful. It just felt like I am not making progress here because there's a lot more things that actually are pressing, right? Like, the kid does need to get fed. I do have to go to my day job. The editor is asking for the next draft of this book, and that is going to take precedence, like it does for so many people that. That things command your. Your bandwidth, even when you have this goal that you've committed to and that you've got on the books. And so I just felt this looming anxiety about this goal that would require. Didn't have to be daily practice, but you can't cram that kind of a goal. It does take committed investment for a sustained period of time. And so I had this looming anxiety that I'm not making good enough progress. But that's because I was relying on my memory and my brain to recall. Like, how many times did you practice? What was it like the last time you practiced? What was it like when you tried to play this bit, you know, or this riff, like, two weeks ago? Have you gotten any better since then? And it just felt like, no, I haven't practiced enough. I don't remember when the last time I played was, but it definitely doesn't feel like I'm getting any better. Then I thought, you know what? I should stop relying on my brain to tell me where am I at? And am I on an upward slope here? I need to look at the data. I love data. Scientists love data. So I started to collect data on myself. What I did was download this app that a friend had told me about called the Reporter app. There's lots of these kinds of things out there. Basically, it just, like, sets up your phone to randomly ping you with whatever questions you want your phone to ask. It records your answers. You can download the data, you can make pretty graphs to see am I getting what's my change and how I've answered these questions over time. So I did that for a month. I had my phone ask me, you know, a couple times a day. Did you practice since last time I asked you? My phone says, did you practice? If mostly it was no, and if yes, then it would funnel a couple other questions like, how did you do? How do you feel? Check a couple different emotion words now about your experience when you played. And I did that for a month. After a month, went into my office, downloaded the data, and first took stock before I looked at the numbers, like, how do I think I did over the last month? And I thought, same as every other month. I. Like, I didn't really get anywhere. Yeah, I practiced, but I still feel awful. But what I found from the data was my memory was totally wrong. I actually had practiced far more times than I remembered. And when I looked at like my emotion words that I used, it was a clear upward trajectory. Yeah, I did cry. That part I hadn't misremembered or made up. But by the end of that month, like, I had gotten a compliment from my husband, who actually is a drummer, and said like, hey, that wasn't that bad. All of which is to say I needed to see, to collect that data on myself and to look at it objectively, accurately and completely, because my brain wasn't doing that for me. That visual experience of downloading that data and looking at what was my actual experience gave me better insight. As I was trying to assess the trajectory of my progress, I became a more accurate accountant of my own progress, which is important for setting goals or resetting them when you need to calibrate in light of. Of what's left to do. And how much time do you have to do it in.

28:35

Fantastic. Well, you've given us a ton of mechanistic and conceptual and practical information. So I'm speaking for a lot of people when I say thank you for taking the time out of your schedule amidst kids and running a lab and teaching at the university. And we hope to have you back again.

35:31

Thank you so much. It was a great conversation.

35:50

Thank you.

35:52

Thanks. Foreign.

35:52

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