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

0:00Andrew Huberman: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. It's my pleasure. 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.

0:36Andrew Huberman: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? 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, you know, self-pep talks, or I remind myself of how important it is to do this job, or put up post-it notes around to like constantly be nagging me about what I need to do. All of that takes a lot of time and effort and commitment.

1:08And 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, you know, not even to the halfway point, but before things get real, things are challenging and we fall by the wayside. So then, 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.

1:40And 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.

1:56Andrew Huberman: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. So, you know, we started thinking about what are the goals that are most important to people that they struggle with the most. 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 of armories all around the boroughs here around New York City.

2:29And the one in Brooklyn in particular is now YMCA. You know, 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 going to find some interesting people that are working out there who, as it turns out, 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.

3:02Where 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 like 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. Like all of them said no. And sometimes when I do do that, it's a mistake. So that was surprising. I totally went against my intuition about what they do that likely contributes to their success.

3:35What 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.

4:05And 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, OK, 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, you know, 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.

4:39You 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.

5:10We 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, you know, 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.

5:44Everybody 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, right? 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.

6:11Andrew Huberman: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. In our interviews with people, our sort of 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 like 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, right, you can imagine that there is that there is a circle shining just on where in their lane they'll cross that finish line.

6:49Or if it's a stop sign, you could 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.

7:31She 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.

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8:47Andrew Huberman:8sleep ships to many countries worldwide, including Mexico and the UAE. Again, that's 8sleep.com slash Huberman to save up to$350. The most pressing question I have in my mind is, can we, I, all of us use this strategy to make the starting line a goal point? Because for a lot of people, it's not about going from start to finish. It's about getting to start. And is there any physiology or physiological changes, I should say, to reflect the idea that maybe just visually focusing on the start line would actually get me more excited as opposed to make me less excited to engage in effort. 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.

9:38A lot of people's go-to strategies that involve vision are vision boards or dream boards or, you know, 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?

10:24Well, first of all, does it work? The answer is no. And why does it not work? Because what happens, these colleagues, Gabrielle Otengen and her research team have found, is that, you know, 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.

11:07And 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.

11:49So 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. So 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.

12:23Because 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.

12:34Andrew Huberman:Everything you're saying, again, is consistent with 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 gonna write a book and people will say, oh, you definitely should write a book. Everyone's gonna 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.

13:10Andrew Huberman:I'm sure there are exceptions to this, but I guess it raises the question, what's the better strategy? Yeah. So I'm not saying that people who enjoy a 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.

13:47We 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 Otengen 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.

14:22And 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 I'm going to get there.

14:56And 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.

15:29Michael 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 in 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?

16:01This 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 have been in the pool, to be honest. Like I'm not a swimmer, definitely not going to be in the Olympics.

16:30But 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 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.

17:11Then 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. So 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 sort of 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.

17:50So 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.

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19:13Andrew Huberman:Again, that's drink AG1 with the numeral one dot com slash Huberman to get six free travel packs and a bottle of vitamin D3K2 with your subscription. I have a question and to be honest, I know the answer in advance, but I'd love for you to tell us a bit about how unfit people view the world versus how fit people view the world or how unmotivated people visually see the world as opposed to highly motivated people. Maybe you could describe that study. I think it's a particularly important one, mostly because yes, it identifies a, perhaps a physiological or psychological differences between motivated and unmotivated or, or fit and unfit people, but it also provides a a path to remedy that?

19:56Yeah. So out of my lab, but also out of several other labs, there's been work 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. So they've looked at people who experience chronic fatigue, the elderly, people who are overweight, those that are you know wearing 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 with extra baggage distances look farther and hills look steeper we've done some of those studies too where we try to like give people more energy or or deprive them of energy and see, does that change their perception of space?

20:50They 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 Splenda. So yeah, it's sweet, but it actually doesn't have any caloric value.

21:25You'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's 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.

21:56We 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 given 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. So we gave some people more energy or we kept others sort of at like whatever their normal level was. And 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.