Hacking your brain to set and achieve goals

#brainhacking #neuroscience #brain #brainscience #personaldevelopment #goals #goalsetting #success

© 2024 Zoryna O’Donnell

This article was first published by The Maverick Paradox Magazine on 12/02/2025

With winter festivities out of the way, the beginning of the New Year is, traditionally, the time when we reflect on where we are now and where we want to be in the future.

This is a great way to acknowledge all our successes, the opportunities to grow which we took, the people who helped and supported us along the way and to feel grateful for all these things in our lives. Acknowledging what went well will quieten our inner critic and calm our limbic system. It will also help to boost our self-compassion, self-esteem, confidence and motivation in preparation for the next year. You can use a brain-friendly EASY model of reflective practice to achieve this.

But don’t limit yourself to just once-a-year reflection and gratitude. According to a white paper The Science of Gratitude published by the Greater Good Science Centre at UC Berkeley in USA, people who regularly practise gratitude are happier, healthier and more successful in many areas of their lives. Gratitude helps us to retrain our brains to notice the good in our lives and to mitigate the impact of the hard-wired negativity biaswhich can hinder our motivation and stop us pursuing our goals and achieving our true potential.  

This gives us a good reason to pause to reflect and to appreciate ourselves and our progress regularly, and to start setting goals or adjusting our actions to achieve our existing goals quicker at any point of the year. As Napoleon Hill said: “Do not wait; the time will never be ‘just right.' Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along."

You may not be aware of it, but our brains love goals. It can be argued that goal setting changes the way our brains function and makes them more effective.

Because our brains play a crucial role not only in setting goals but also in achieving them, it does make sense to explore a few brain hacks which can help us in our pursuit of success. …

Please read the entire article here. [ https://themaverickparadox.com/hacking-your-brain-to-set-and-achieve-goals/ ]

Image credit: QuinceCreative via Pixabay.