7 Research-Backed Ways to Help You Achieve Your Goals

The beginning of a new year is often a time to assess your life and create plans. Some refer to these as resolutions or intentions, and others call these goals. Regardless of the terminology you use, changing your behavior is hard. Many people find themselves abandoning their new plans before January is even over. 

However, researchers have studied behavior change to understand how our bodies react to it, and how we can use this knowledge to our advantage. Here are 7 ideas to help you achieve your goals, backed by research. 

Create positive goals
We often create goals around behaviors that we want to change. But we’re much more likely to want to achieve our goals if we focus on the positive rather than the negative, and there’s a biological reason for that. You’re likely familiar with your fight/flight response. Greater Good Magazine states, “Below the surface of awareness, through a process called neuroception, our brain and nervous system are constantly scanning for cues of threat/danger or for cues of safety.” When your body encounters what it considers a threat, you might have the urge to freeze or do nothing. So, when you frame a goal in a negative way, your nervous system might consider it a “threat,” and you’re more likely to freeze up, put it off or do what you can to avoid it.

Instead of setting a goal “to lose weight,” you would set a goal to “eat more tasty, healthy foods and spend 30 minutes each day doing an activity I enjoy like dancing or walking.” By framing the goal in a positive way, your body is less likely to view it as a “threat” and have an adverse reaction to it.  

Acknowledge there will be roadblocks
When you’re trying to make a change, you’ll run into obstacles. Life is never as black and white as we sometimes wish it was. Changing behavior is incredibly hard, and learning to adapt as you go will make it easier. Perhaps you have a busy week at work, so you’re home late every night and exhausted when you arrive. Your 30-minute workouts might not be possible that week. 

While you might be upset with yourself, being mad at yourself isn’t helping. Rather, acknowledge you had a busy week, forgive yourself and plan to return to your routine next week. Or, this might be an opportunity to reassess your goals. Maybe it makes more sense to wake up early and run before work, or do your meal prep in the morning, so you can save time making a healthy dinner when you get home. 

Determine which goals are most important
One way to make accomplishing your goals easier is to prioritize them. This may seem obvious, but when you reflect on what goals are truly most important, it’s easier for your brain to focus on those tasks. The reason for that is that complex tasks require executive functioning skills. 

So, working toward a new goal is “a serial process,” meaning you can only accomplish one goal at a time. When focused on one task, you naturally can’t focus on others. According to the article “The Neuroscience of Goals and Behavior Change,” Elliot T. Berkman states, “A given task will feel relatively easy when it is more important to a person than the alternative choices.” Focusing on the more important tasks first makes accomplishing those tasks easier because you’re less distracted. Then, after you complete the first goal, you can move to the next priority. 

Turn your goal into a new habit
You can also leverage habit learning, even with complex goals. Berkman states, “However, complex mental operations can become routinized by leveraging the habit learning system. Habit learning is facilitated when the new behavior is consistently preceded by specific cues and then rewarded. This procedure can be particularly useful for behavior change if the new behavior will occur repeatedly in similar contexts.” You’re probably familiar with the example of Pavlov’s dogs. Pavlov did an experiment where when dogs heard a bell, they were given a treat. It got to the point that when the dogs heard the bell, their mouths would water. Though this experiment was about conditioning, it demonstrates the power of creating similar conditions, rewarding behavior and how strong that connection can become. 

If you’re trying to eat healthier, maybe that means eating dinner at a nicely set table and after, rewarding yourself with a long walk, a crossword puzzle or an episode of your favorite trash TV. Just make sure to create a similar atmosphere (nicely set table) and then follow it with the same reward (an episode of Real Housewives). With repetition, this can become a habit. 

Find ways to reward the new behavior
Rewards also help enforce new behaviors. Berkman states, “Behavior change can be accomplished by amplifying the value of the new (goal-related) behavior, reducing the value of old (goal-counter or goal-unrelated) behaviors, or some combination of the two.” To start a new behavior, like using social media less or working out, you have to reward that new behavior, and it helps to amplify the reward.

While you’ll certainly have more free time if you’re not on social media as much, that likely isn’t reward enough to change the behavior. A more substantial reward might be treating yourself to a new set of watercolors if you enjoy painting, or springing for that yoga class you’ve been eyeing. This not only places value on the new behavior, it also makes the old behavior less rewarding, as you wouldn’t have as much time for yoga class or using your new watercolors.

Making change identity-focused
Researchers have found people are more likely to do something if that behavior is linked positively to their sense of self. Berkman states, “For example, phrasing questions about voting intentions in terms of identity (noun: “being a voter”) instead of an action (verb: “voting”) increased voting intentions and actual turnout in statewide elections.” So, when making your goals, remember to tie your goals to your identity. Something like, “I will increase my creativity by setting aside an hour each week to work on my art.” 

Break goals up
Another way to achieve goals is to start small. Berkman states, “Thus, wise advice for clients that is grounded in the neuroscience of motivation and reinforcement learning is to start behavior change with modest goals and reward even the smallest steps toward them. New behaviors emerge slowly because they are usually working against the power of prior reinforcement.” In other words, it’s hard to change behavior because your prior behaviors have been reinforced. To reinforce and ease creating new behaviors, start small and reward yourself consistently as you progress. 

So, if you’re trying to find a new job, maybe you start by re-writing your resume, then your cover letter and updating your LinkedIn profile. Then, after you’ve completed that, plan to spend 15 minutes a few times a week looking for positions. And, of course, reward yourself after you meet each milestone to celebrate moving toward your goal. 

Changing your behavior to achieve a new goal can seem daunting, but using these research-backed ideas should make meeting your new goals easier.