Essentials: How to Set & Achieve Goals

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. Today we're talking all about goals and the science of goal setting and achieving your goals. So when we think about goal seeking, and the pursuit of goals of any kind in the brain, it doesn't matter what the goal is, it involves a common set of neural circuits.

One of the brain areas is the so-called amygdala. The amygdala is most often associated with fear, so you might say, wow, how is that involved in goal-directed behavior? Well, a lot of our goal-directed behavior is to avoid punishments. including things like embarrassment or financial ruin or things of that sort. And so the amygdala and some sense of anxiety or fear is actually built into the circuits that generate goal seeking and our motivation to pursue goals.

The other areas are the so-called ventral striatum. The striatum is part of what's called the basoganglia. The basoganglia is a neural circuit that can very simply be described as a neural circuit that helps us generate go, meaning the initiation of action, and no go, the prevention of action type scenarios. Let me make that even simpler.

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