Goal setting: How it helps rewire your brain for resilience
How setting achievable, fun goals can help you bounce back from stress.
Did you know setting small, achievable, fun goals can help you bounce back from stress?
Goal setting can be a powerful tool for rewiring your brain for resilience and improving your mental wellbeing.
To understand how this works, we first need to understand how stress affects the brain.
Stress, survival mode, and the prefrontal cortex
We live in a world where stress is the norm.
There is good stress (eustress) – think rollercoasters and new challenges. Good stress can be motivating and energising.
But, there is also prolonged stress. Problems occur when we live under constant pressure. When we’re under prolonged stress, our brain can rewire to survival mode.
Our brain changes depending on how we use it. The brain is all about efficiency. It rewires itself through the circuits that are activated the most often.
When we experience chronic stress our lower reactive brain, responsible for the fight or flight response, is in a constant state of activation. As a result, the connections in our reactive brain become stronger and faster. This happens at the expense of the connections in our higher reflective brain (the prefrontal cortex).
One of the roles of the prefrontal cortex is to control our emotional response to stress. When connections in the prefrontal cortex are weak, we can feel on edge, anxious, out of sorts, and at greater risk of burnout.
Rewiring the brain for resilience
Fortunately, there are ways to strengthen the connections in the prefrontal cortex – to rewire the brain to bounce back from stressful situations, and to feel better along the way.
One way is to plan and achieve goals – goal setting. These could be learning goals, fitness goals, creativity goals. The importance is not the goal itself, but the process of setting small goals and noticing your progress.
How does goal setting help?
Goal setting – and anticipating progress – triggers your brain’s dopamine/reward system.
Dopamine is known as the ‘motivator’ hormone. It helps you get off the couch and do things you enjoy. It’s associated with pleasure, satisfaction, and reward.
When you know what it is that gives you that pleasurable reward or sense of progress or achievement, you’ll look forward to it and how it makes you feel.
The effort/reward experience then creates brain networks that expect positive outcomes, helping you to feel more optimistic and better about yourself.
Simple goals to try
Anything that requires ongoing practice counts as a goal. It might help to replace the word ‘goal’ with ‘hobby’. Goal setting doesn’t have to be grand – it can encompass anything from learning how to cartoon to trying to bake a new cake recipe each week.
Here are some ideas of simple, fun goals that might trigger your brain’s dopamine/reward system and help to rewire for resilience.
Knitting
Cooking
Baking
Cake decorating
Rock climbing
Dancing
Yoga
Painting
Drawing
Pottery
Cartooning
Writing
Volunteering
Restoring furniture
Fantasy sports
Board games
Video games
Gardening
Learning the basics of a new language
Whatever goal or hobby you choose, break it down into small, achievable chunks to make the most of the dopamine/reward system. For example, if you decide to take up cartooning, start by setting yourself the goal of drawing circles and ovals one week, then triangles and squares the next, and continue building on your skills week-on-week.
Try the 1-3-5 method to be realistic about your to do list and make time for your goals and hobbies.
If you set your sights too high, you could end up feeling disappointed and jeopardize the dopamine/reward response.
Remember: Make it fun
The more you enjoy something, the more likely you are to continue doing it – which will help encourage the dopamine/reward system and rewire your brain for resilience.
