Life Extension Science & Strategy with Sergey Young

Have you ever wondered how goal-setting works in your brain? Setting goals helps you achieve tasks. In fact, goal-setting can be one of your most powerful tools to change your habits and shape your life. They motivate you to go after the things you want, help you overcome obstacles you find difficult, and even make things you thought were out of reach become attainable.

But goals do more than help make things happen. They shift your perspective on what you believe is possible. Goals restructure your brain by creating new neural pathways that allow it to work more efficiently. This helps you focus your energy into making new behaviors habits.

Here’s how goal-setting works in your brain:

A Deeper Look at the Brain

Just as your skin will heal from a cut or a scrape, your brain has the power to heal and restructure itself through neuroplasticity. This incredible process means your brain not only reorganizes synaptic pathways after a brain injury, such as a stroke, but it can also adapt and change your behavior in response to new information.

Your brain loves direction. That’s why this process is incredibly effective for goal setting. Goals give it a purpose and it will actively seek information in your environment to help you achieve your goals. This creates new neural pathways, which helps change your behaviors towards your goals.

In a study of multiple sclerosis patients at the University of Texas, researchers found patients who set aggressive goals regarding their health and wellness had fewer and less severe symptoms. Focusing on their goals healed their brain. That’s the power of neuroplasticity.

The Importance of Meaning

Setting a goal is only one piece of the process. Research shows that the more a goal means to you, the more likely you are to reach it.

Your brain routes information through the amygdala. It evaluates and determines the level of emotional significance to events. It then loops to the frontal lobe for higher-level cognitive processing. Having goals rooted in meaning will always get a boost in importance.

It’s easy to understand the process in terms of your own experiences. For example, saving money so you can go on the vacation of your dreams is a lot easier than paying off debt. Though debt can be stressful, imagining yourself on vacation can have a much larger emotional significance tied to it, giving it higher priority in your brain. This helps your brain filter out everything that will stand in the way while alerting your attention to the situations, information, and behaviors that will help you achieve the goal.

You might set goals because you have to, not because you want to, and that can hinder your ability to reach them. In order to attach to emotional significance, you need to find a solid emotional reason for wanting to complete that goal. Getting a good annual review at work might be something you want logically, but if you don’t attach emotion to it, this long-term goal is difficult to focus on and prioritize. However, if you decide that getting an excellent review leads to a raise, and that will help you buy your dream home, the emotional significance of that goal is now elevated.

Every time you have to fill out a report or complete a mundane task, you can envision that house and your motivation will increase. The more emotion you attach to a goal, the more your brain work to minimize obstacles and difficulties. In short, the more it means to you, the more likely you’ll achieve it, no matter what.

How the Brain Works on Achieving the Set Goal

Goal-setting in your brain comes down to the amygdala and the frontal lobe. It’s combining logic with heart that creates the powerful drive known as motivation. But the third aspect of your brain that guarantees goal-setting success is your reward system.

Your brain reinforces behavior by releasing the neurochemical dopamine whenever you engage in activities that keep you alive. Eating food, drinking water, even falling in love, as you’re more likely to survive when you build relationships. Your brain ties the reward system and learning together. When you learn something new, your brain rewards you with a dopamine surge that boosts your mood and makes you feel happy. Because dopamine is so potent, your brain craves more of it, creating motivation for you to seek more.

This process is the reward loop, and you can use it to create habits. Once you’ve attached emotional significance to your goal, you can use the reward system to break them down into smaller goals. Your frontal lobe evaluates and assesses the logistical breakdown of your goals, which allows you to visualize and plan each minor goal within your larger one. Each step should have a defined measure for success and a specific way that you want to celebrate that success. These external rewards will activate your internal reward system, giving you even more motivation to continue to the next step.

Conclusion

No matter what your goals are, your brain is hard-wired to help you achieve them. By understanding the power of neuroplasticity, connecting emotion to logic, and creating a system of external and internal rewards, you can overcome any obstacles for whatever goal you strive towards.

Watch this video for more on how to reach your goals:

How important is a positive mindset? For many, the New Year is a definitive marker to signal a time for change. But without the right mindset, these goals can feel overwhelming and too easily slip to the wayside. Before you launch full speed into going after your resolutions, take some time to reflect on 2022 to strengthen your mindset and achieve everything you want in 2023 and beyond.

1- Outline your accomplishments and successes

When you think about what you want in the new year, it’s common to focus on the things you didn’t do or achieve in the previous year. You might find yourself saying things like, this is the year you get that promotion or learn that hobby or lose that weight. It may not seem like focusing on the things you want is starting in a negative mindset, but when you think about what the new year can bring that the current one didn’t, you’re actually focusing on failure instead of success.

Instead, take time to focus on every single accomplishment and success you’ve had throughout the year. No success is too small for this list. Write down personal accomplishments and professional achievements. Did you help your neighbor shovel their driveway? Write it down. Did you lead your team in a project at work? Write it down. If you find that it’s hard to remember the success, this might be a good time to start a journal and list your wins at the end of every day so you can flip back to celebrate not just on New Year’s Eve, but throughout the year.

By focusing on your successes, you are reminding yourself of every positive event you achieved. This triggers the reward system in your brain, triggering the release of feel-good hormones. Success is addicting for exactly this reason. A positive mindset helps you embrace optimism and joy of the previous year and is paramount for continued success.

2- Internalize lessons learned

While you’re riding the joy of success, this is the time to reflect on what didn’t work. This may seem like following your positive thought process with a negative one, but you don’t want to simply list your failures. Instead, you want to think about what didn’t work and why.

Emily Fletcher from Ziva Meditation encourages you to change the question, “Why is this happening to me?” to “Why is this happening for me?”. It’s changing one word, but that word changes your mindset from a negative to a positive. It isn’t the event that matters, but what lessons you can learn from it.

Your brain doesn’t like an open loop. If you ask yourself why things happen to you, it will seek out examples of how you were wronged. So by changing the question, your brain then starts to seek out examples of what you can learn and gain from each event. It’s a small distinction that makes a huge difference in how you process events in your lives. There’s always a lesson in every event, both the good and the bad. By focusing on those instead of the events themselves, you can change into a positive mindset by always seeking opportunities instead of focusing on the downside.

3- Write down the possibilities

This is where you welcome your dreams and put them on paper. Write down everything you want to accomplish. Again, this list isn’t limited to things you think are possible or realistic. This is a list of every single thing you want for the year. Focusing on a long list of potential events and achievements may feel overwhelming, but if you open yourself to exploring what you want without limit, you may end up being surprised what lands on that list.

Often, you choose goals that you think are achievable or that you think others want you to achieve. These aren’t bad goals, but they may not be the right goals for you. A goal should make you nervous. It should make you a little afraid because that’s when your brain goes out of the comfortable habit loop and becomes active. When you write down all of your possibilities, you will know what stands out, what makes you nervous. What you really want shines through like a beacon and those are the goals you should focus on for the new year.

4- Make a plan

It’s normal to think of setting a goal as a finite thing. If you want to lose weight, you go on a diet and go to the gym every day. If you want to learn a foreign language, you buy a program and practice every day while you commute. If you want to write a book, you sit down and write 1,000 words every day. Sound familiar?

Knowing what you want and what you need to do to get there is only part of making a plan. The other part is planning for everything else. What happens when you have a bad day, or even a bad week? What do you do when you feel stuck or unmotivated? How will you work through any obstacles that come up? Can you think of what those might be?

Making a plan for success is trying to answer as many questions as you can about the reality of executing your goal. You should have small goals to mark success, a list of people you can turn to for advice or motivation when things get hard, an understanding of what tools and resources you will need as you make progress, and an idea of what you think is going to happen as you work towards your goal. Having a plan is vital to maintaining a positive mindset where you believe success is possible.

5- Be flexible

Part of getting in the right mindset is also knowing that things will go wrong. No matter how well you plan, or how achievable your goals may seem, things will go wrong. You will hit roadblocks and obstacles. There will be tough days and rough weeks where you doubt and question if you can reach your goal. But if you know that this is normal, you can prepare for these hard times in advance.

Flexibility also means being aware that your goal may shift or change as you progress. Maybe the thing you set out to do isn’t feasible anymore in terms of getting you to your longer-term goals. Or perhaps a new opportunity arises that makes more sense. Knowing that goals shift and change happens helps you adjust your mindset well in advance.

Conclusion

Setting a goal or resolution isn’t a set it and forget it process. It requires getting into the right mindset by adjusting how you look at difficulties and obstacles while preparing rock-solid plans to achieve your goals.

Watch this video for more on the power of mindset: