Goal-setting season fast approaches, and with it the exciting process of reviewing 2019 achievements and creating your best, bold vision for 2020. Doing your goal-setting right is crucial as it will define your whole year.
Yet as the song goes, ‘It ain’t what you do it’s the way that you do it’. To be done well, the way in which you set your goals needs careful planning too.
Common wisdom tells us ‘Never go food shopping while you’re hungry’, for a very good reason. When you’re hungry, your body wants lots of calories fast so that you don’t starve. It’s an ancient biological imperative, and even though you’re unlikely to be actually starving, your nervous system drives you to fix the food shortage problem. The result; you buy more food than you need, impulse-buy foods heavy in sugars and fats, and load up on convenience foods that can be prepared quickly. Any good intentions for a healthy diet, low food waste and a smart budget fly out of the window.
It’s not just hunger that we react to instinctively. All of our good decision-making can be hijacked by our nervous system if it detects danger, including when we’re making goals for the coming year.
The culprit is the amygdala, a pair of almond-sized structures in the brain. The amygdala scans incoming information from all of our senses, just like a virus detector scans your emails before you read them. If there is no threat detected, the amygdala does nothing and the information passes to the front of the brain, the frontal cortex, for logical and strategic planning. Here we think clearly and long-term.
If a threat is detected, however, the nervous system is put on high alert, ready to escape death through a fight, flight or freeze response. Our frontal cortex doesn’t get much of a say as older areas of the brain step up to handle the danger reactively. These ancient physiological pathways were crucial for human survival in the wild. However, in our modern world, they can respond to everyday disturbances as if they were life-threatening events.
This high-alert state colours how we see the world around us – it becomes a more threatening and dangerous place. We focus more on the short-term and see others as competitors for scarce resources rather than collaborators for mutual abundance. The environment hasn’t changed, but our interpretation of it has. When we’re in the high-alert state, we don’t make good decisions.
Luckily modern neuroscience has discovered ways to manage the nervous system and move back into the safe, social-engagement state that allows us to think clearly. And plan well.
It makes sense, then, to plan your goal-setting session carefully, to maximise your ability to make the best decisions for the coming year.
Here are a few ways you can put yourself into the best (nervous system) state before you start planning.
· Go somewhere quiet with few visual distractions or movements for your brain to monitor
· Disconnect from all media during your planning, so the amygdala is not triggered randomly by other concerns
· Minimise low-frequency sounds by switching off boilers, fans and air-conditioners. Low-frequency sound is interpreted biologically as a threat like a large, dangerous predator growling
· Do slow deep breathing before you start your planning session, exhaling for longer than you inhale.
· If you’re physically tense, stand up and shake your body vigorously for a couple of minutes, to release some of the stress hormones that accompany chronic tension
· If you’re alone, close your eyes and imagine talking to someone who cares about you. See their face and their smile. Our nervous system is calmed by seeing friendly caring faces. If you’re with others, tell some jokes and relax together first
· Approach your planning with as much positive emotion as possible – excitement, inspiration and anticipation of success. This fosters the right state too.
Another great tip is to go somewhere new to do your planning. Unfamiliar surroundings cause your brain to pay more attention, and yes, to look out for threats. However if you keep your nervous system in the safe, social-engagement state then this extra neural activity will increase your creativity and problem-solving.
Carefully choose where and how you’ll do your planning for 2020. Have fun too, not just because it’s enjoyable, but because it makes for the very best goals.
