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

This Huberman Lab Essentials episode features host Andrew Huberman, a Stanford professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology, in conversation with psychologist Dr. Emily Balcetis. Huberman frames the meeting as an overlap of interests: as a vision scientist who also cares about practical tools for goal-setting and motivation, he asks how vision and motivation link up. (The speaker labels in the source transcript are swapped in places. This article attributes remarks by their content: Huberman introduces himself and asks the questions, and Balcetis describes her lab's research.)

Balcetis starts with what people say when psychologists ask how they are making progress on their goals. The usual answers are self-pep talks, reminding themselves how important the goal is, and Post-it notes that keep nagging them. She argues that all of this takes sustained time, effort and commitment, so it is no surprise that people burn out. A goal feels exciting when first set, but people often fall away before the halfway point, once things become challenging. Her team went looking for strategies that need less effort and can be automated by drawing on what already happens in the body and mind. That search led them to vision, and to the idea that people could look at the world differently and "maybe literally see opportunities that we hadn't been able to see before."

Balcetis says that, wherever and whenever people are asked, their number one goal relates to health, so her team began with exercise. A physical therapist invited her to a Brooklyn armory that is now a YMCA, where some of the world's fastest runners train, including one who had won Olympic gold in the 400 meters. She expected these elite athletes to be hyper-aware of their surroundings: competitors, peripheral vision, who was behind and who was ahead. They told her the opposite. All of them said no, and some said that when they did look around it was a mistake.

They assume this narrowed focus of attention, almost like a spotlight is shining on a target.

In a short race, the target can be the finish line itself. Over longer distances, runners set sub-goals, such as the shorts of the runner ahead or a stable landmark like a sign, as if wearing blinders. Balcetis's team then asked whether non-athletes could be taught the same tactic. The training tells people to pick a target ahead, such as a stop sign two blocks away, imagine a spotlight on it, tune out passersby, buildings, garbage cans and trucks, and then choose a new target once they reach it.