Andrew Huberman is a professor of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at the Stanford School of Medicine and he also has an interesting podcast show called the Huberman Lab podcast. In his episode "The Science of Setting & Achieving Goals" he describes setting goals, assessing progress and the execution towards this goal in the context of neuroscience. In this blog post I provide some key take aways from this episode. If this is interesting to you, I encourage you to listen to the whole episode.
Learning
In order to reach your goal, you have to learn new skills or habits. Learning is the creation or reorganization of connections in the nervous system (the brain, spinal cord and the body). One of the key principles for your nervous system to create or reorganize connections, is to make errors. Making errors feel frustrating, but that state of frustration actually increases your focus on your next attempts and therefore gives a higher probability of learning a new skill. However, you shouldn't make too many errors either because that defeats all the fun. As a guideline for optimal learning the 85% rule can be used. This rule suggests to do things right 85% of the time, and make errors about 15% of the time.
The Feeling of Motivation
As mentioned, the goal shouldn't be too difficult but it also shouldn't be too easy. When you feel motivated, a bit of adrenaline is released and your blood pressure raises a healthy amount. This puts your body ready for action. When goals are too easy or unrealistic to reach, then your body wont be put into a state of readiness. So it is important that the difficulty of your goal is moderate.
Fear as a Motivation
The brain and body are much better at moving away from fearful things than towards things we want. This increased the likelyhood that humans survived in the past and humans didn't evolve much lately. In order to trigger this 'fear' to start moving, is to visualize the worst case scenario. Say you want to stop smoking; it is more motivating to see the catastrophy of damage a cigarette can cause than it is to look at a healthy picture of your future self.
Nevertheless, to initially start the pursuit of your goal it is important to visualize where you are moving towards. But to maintain this pursuit, it is more effective to use fear.
Setting Milestones Optimized for Dopamine
Dopamine is often thought of as the molecule of pleasure and reward, but actually it is the molecule of motivation. If you don't have any dopamine in your system, then it is still possible to experience pleasure. However, if this pleasure is just without reach, then without dopamine you wouldn't put any effort in to get this pleaasure. So you will feel more motivated to pursue your goal if you release more dopamine. There are some things we can do in order to optimize this. For example, more dopmaine is released when something positive happens when you don't expect it as opposed to when you did expect it.
Milestones are good to assess progress and when assessing your progress a bit of dopamine is released to move towards the next milestone as well. The optimal frequency of assessing your progress should be aimed at once a week. A nice benefit of having a scheduled interval of assessing progress is that it opens up for unexpected positive things to happen in between to, which releases more dopamine and thus motivates you more.
Stop if you constantly think you are failing. If you don't reach any of your milestones or not making any progress towards your goal, then not much dopamine is released when assessing your progress. Note that visualizing the failure as described earlier, is not the same thing as thinking you are actually failing.
Source: The Science of Setting & Achieving Goals by Dr. Andrew Huberman