Neuroscientists Reveals The Psychology Behind Achieving Goals | Andrew Huberman EP 792

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:13We've all heard the sayings, you know, journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, or how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time, or, you know, they're all these sayings, and it goes back to the Bible and earlier, right? I mean, this is not new. These are not new sayings, but they're showing up in different forms. What's lost in those short descriptions, however, is that every step is not equivalent. If it were just that a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, everyone would pursue their goals. Everyone would push back against adversity. Everyone, I mean, you can read the inspirational stories as many times as one needs.

0:46And I do think inspirational stories are of very high value. In fact, I think they're vicarious dopamine. I think they give us the sense that we could, which then orients, hope, which then orients us to the world again. To start, yeah, maybe it's possible for me. That's right. The thing to remember is that dopamine is this incredibly powerful molecule that allows us to buffer the effort process. It allows us to be in effort longer, and it allows us to actually eventually enjoy the process of effort. And not think about the reward, but just say, oh, I'm enjoying the process. Well, you just described the first step.

1:20The first step in learning to attach dopamine to the effort process, which is the key operation in order to succeed, is to be very careful about how much you focus on the end goal. Keeping the goal in mind is important for like a proper orientation. You have to know the ultimate destination. But if at any point we were to evaluate our progress relative to that end goal, or if we don't know what the end goal is, there's a huge gap there. And it can feel overwhelming. And depressing and I'm not good enough. That's right. I should just give up. What am I doing this for? That's right. And those thoughts will affect us.

1:56And they're very realistic, right? I mean, as Carol will say and other people have said in the psychology field, you know, positive self-talk oftentimes, unless you do it correctly, you're badly wrong. So I think the key thing is to attach that sense of reward to the effort process. It's saying, look, I am oriented in the right direction and rewarding the things you're not doing. I'm not back on my heels. I'm not just staying, you know, in bed in the morning. A good example of this came to me recently. I have a good friend. He did nine years in the SEAL teams. And we were talking about, you know, the Admiral McRaven thing, you know, get up and make your bed.

2:29And, you know, they really do that. And I think the way it was described was, you know, so at the end of the day, even if everything doesn't go well, your bed is still made. For me, that's not that big of a reward, frankly. I felt like there was something else there. So I asked him, he said, well, it's very interesting because part of it is about not just making your bed, but it's the things you're not doing by making your bed. You're not lying in bed and ruminating. You're not back on your heels. You're not on your phone. That's right. What you find is that, you know, we can all be either be back on our heels, flat footed or forward center of mass.

3:01And when you look at people who are in these high performance communities, they try and keep their center of mass forward. Almost through what seem like trivial things like making your bed or making the cup of coffee. But it's not just about what you're doing. It's all the things you're not doing that can put you down the path of ruminating or put you down the path of unhealthy behavior. So the key to this is if we want to be very concrete, we should probably focus on actions. And I'll use fitness as an example because it translates to everybody, whereas people's circumstances differ. Let's say somebody really wants to take on a fitness routine.

3:33They hate running or they want to lose weight in a healthy way, this kind of thing. So we've all heard the example, well, you put your shoes by the door on day one. Day two, you put them on. Day three, you go out the door. Day four, you walk around the block and then, you know, and then eventually like they're running marathons. Okay, great. But to sustain that behavior or even to make the behavior pleasurable and to give you energy, the key is to subjectively reward those steps. So it's not going to be, let's say I go out and I run a mile and my goal is to run 10 miles in a few weeks. The key is as you're in the strain of that mile, the hard part, you want to tell yourself this is the good part.

4:13This is the part that gives me energy. And I'll be very surprised if people don't actually feel like they could continue further. A journey of a thousand miles is made up of, you know, single steps. but the key is to reward the harder steps, not the easier ones and not the ones where you get the thing that you want. Don't reward yourself for putting your shoes on and taking a step outside. You could if that was a huge barrier for you. If it was very hard. If it was very hard for you. Running to 10 miles, it's hard. Find the wall and push a little bit further through that wall and reward that process.

4:45So this is why I think reps in the gym, the final reps, like reps to failure, are usually not the best example. This is the hard part because that's when adrenaline, norepinephrine are getting maxed out. And that's when you have an opportunity to bring dopamine in and teach those neural pathways to slam that back down. You look at people in special operations, you look at the evaluation process of who gets in and who doesn't. It's really about putting people into stress and seeing who can not just make it through that stress, but buffer that stress, reward the process through teamwork, reward the process of stress through some internal dialogue that has everything to do with not being back on your heels, not being flat-footed, but center of mass forward.

5:22And I should also be clear I'm not talking about everybody being super aggro and always like, you know Work work work. Yeah, in fact if you're spending too much epinephrine if you're too much of an adrenaline junkie You will burn out eventually Unless you can find ways to recover yourself or to buffer that with dopamine and the recovery process is especially important There's a second reward system So you've got the dopamine system. And I guess to really put a box around it, subjective reward needs to be done at the hardest portion of a process. The tough conversation with a significant other, it's like when it's really tough, that's when you want to start telling yourself, this is the good part because I'm not speaking or this is the good part because - I'm not reacting.

6:05Right, I'm not reacting or this is the good part because I'm probably not doing it correctly, but I'm on the right path, right? They're upset, they're not feeling your empathy, you know, this kind of thing, or you're not really understanding what's going on, you're getting frustrated. But if you tell yourself, this is the neural pathway getting ground in there, like it really dialed in so that the next time this, I'm gonna breeze right past this. That's really how the process works. Because remember, no one comes along and drips dopamine in your ear, even if you get a billion dollars or you win a Nobel prize or you win the presidency.

6:39It's all internal. These neurochemicals are all internal. And while some of them are designed to be released in response to things very reflexively, like, you know, food, sex, sleep, you know, all these things will trigger these neurochemicals. We have this big forebrain, which allows us to play subjective context. There's a process I'm going through right now where I'm trying to write a book and it's hard. It's hard. And I was told that the harder it is, the better I'm probably doing it. And I was like, great. My editor is ready to kill me and I'm slow and I and I know and I'm a very slow person.

7:11I drive people crazy. I'm like glacially slow because science is slow. And I like to get things right. You don't rush it. I like to get things right. But I'm very proud of the fact that everything we've published, I can stand behind. It was the best we could do with the tools at the time. And I just know that when I look back on a writing career or a scientific career, I want to be able to say, you know, every journal we put in was rock solid. Everything was rock solid. We had fun doing it. The relationship. So I go slow. Yeah. But as a consequence, what I'm finding is there are a lot of interferences these days.

7:39I think social media is great. I teach neuroscience on social media because I think it's important to do public education traction, but it's incredible. And it's incredible how much time and energy it can take. So what I've started doing now is I turn off my phone and I lock it in a safe. The longer I can keep that phone in a safe and write a grant or my or this book, I find that as I start to write and I get into the process, I start feeling good about it. And I'll pause and say, okay, I have control. I have ultimate control over my behavior. I can put that thing away. There might be a nuclear war out there and I'm just doing this anyway.

8:15I have control over my thoughts, my feelings and behavior. So I tell myself that. And then I find I have immense energy and all I want to do is write. And I think that sometimes people need to write these things out for themselves. So it's really concrete. I think some people are so unskilled at subjective rewards that writing it out is really powerful. So what would you write out for yourself as a subjective reward for this experience? As long as I'm writing, I'm on the right path. Anything else that you're not doing is holding you back from doing that. That's right. So you need to be focused, center and mass forward on doing those things.

8:47That's right.

8:57I am so excited for you to finish the rest of your day strong. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description and it'll take you to the full episode of my other show, The School of Greatness. Make sure to come back tomorrow for another episode of The Daily Motivation Show.