A goal is, very simply, something to aim for. Altering nutritional practices and habits to improve your health, body composition, athletic ability or general wellbeing is not done arbitrarily. Rather, specific alterations are chosen and then implemented because you perceive that there is a disparity between the current situation and the hypothetical future ideal (the same, of course, applies when working with someone else).
You change your nutrition because you are here, you want to be somewhere else and you consider nutrition to be the path that connects the two. As such, someone who changes their nutrition already has a goal in mind at some level, it’s just not at a very high resolution. Setting goals gives that fuzzy, blurred ideal some definition. This is important because it is not self-evident which direction you should take when your destination is only defined as ‘not here’, or ‘over there’. Pinpointing a precise end result illuminates the direction in which you need to go, meaning that you are able to then work out how to start moving. Without this precise definition, you are free to take any action you can think of, meaning you often become overwhelmed and frozen into inaction.As Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat famously stated: “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there”.
It goes deeper than just defining terms, however; human beings are creatures that need goals in order to be satisfied. In previous modules, we have noted the importance of the neurotransmitter dopamine for experiencing reward, but also in anticipation of reward.
Recall that the brain has areas that become activated by behaviour closely tied to an individual’s values, and recall that dopamine is released in order to create excitement in the pursuit of a valued reward. Not yet mentioned is that this activity is most notably seen in a structure called the nucleus accumbens, which is the same structure associated with the anticipation of a ‘fix’ for those with addictions. Finally, recall that self-affirmations that closely tie certain alterations in behaviour to values create better outcomes than an attempt to make those same changes without appealing to deeply held beliefs.
Bringing this all together, you should see that a goal set according to someone’s values creates excitement during the process. Setting a value-based and well-defined goal creates anticipation mediated by dopaminergic neuronal activity, and therefore entices a greater success rate. To lend more evidence to the argument that goal setting creates anticipation and excitement, therefore increased effort, consider the following – when researched, individuals described as ‘go getters’ show a significantly higher level of dopaminergic activity than do people who could be described as ‘slackers’.
Ultimately, humans need a purpose. Depression rates for unemployed people are significantly higher than for employed people, and the same goes for those on long-term sickness leave. Furthermore, a feeling of purpose has been shown to improve depressive symptoms in retired persons, with those being given plants to look after showing greater perceptions of self-efficacy and the associated improved state of greater mental health. Experientially, when a person has a specific goal or aim, be that an engaging period of study, an engaging writing task, a job which they love or a task which they find challenging but enjoyable, or even an art project, they will often report losing track of time because they become so focused and engrossed.
This engagement with a task is self-evidently an important part of human experience because it allows us to spend hours without having a single negative or anxious thought; and is a sharp contrast to the feelings of boredom and slowly passing time associated with days of inactivity and purposelessness, or with completing a task that one finds unbearably monotonous and unpleasant. To most, an hour spent working on a creative project, completing a task in an engaging computer game or writing something they have set out to write for their own purposes, is a much shorter hour than one spent copying data from one spreadsheet to another, or cleaning the oven.
In short, the first step of setting a goal is aligning a hypothetical future state with your values, and for that you need an aim.