Don't tell people your goals

The scientific reasoning for not telling people your goals so that you can achieve more in 2024.

Imagine you want to be a YouTuber, you've just finished watching a great video and you're imagining yourself in that position, thinking that you could do that too. Posting videos with thousands of subscribers watching your content. You've just told your friend about some of the thoughts going in on in your head, and how you want to a YouTuber. Assuming you have a good friend, he or she will have responded validating your ideas and probably assuring you that is a "cool", "fun" or "interesting" idea. You leave the conversation slightly happier and validated that your idea is a good one. You're motivation increases in that short moment. of course what goes up must come down. After having told your first friend, you tell 3 others in the next few days about your plans to start your YouTube channel. but... you haven't actually started yet. solely spoken about it. Your other 3 friends validate your ideas too. You wait a few more days and watch more YouTube videos for inspiration. After doing research you find out that you need to buy a camera, and with the videos that you want to make, a good one. it turns out that getting a camera is not so cheap and so you need to find a job or pick up more shifts at work to get the money to fork out an expensive camera. suddenly 3 weeks have gone by, and the more research you do, the more you realise how many small extra details you would love to add to your project and the time needed to make your dreams a reality. Eventually you buy a camera, but you struggle in the editing apps and in the end you give up. You end up looking like a fool to all those people that you boasted your ideas to. (in reality people are not thinking about you, so don't be afraid to look like a fool sometimes!) Although a demotivating story it is probably quite a relatable one to a lot of people with ambitious goals. but what happened along the way that stopped you from achieving you goal? why did you suddenly lose motivation?

Well, Inside our brain, there is the well-known chemical called dopamine. We release dopamine when we talk and chat, or when we get reward such as food, sex, money such as gambling reward or social reward such as compliments. When we release dopamine it tells us what we are doing is right and we chase more dopamine, thus, dopamine is fundamental to our motivation to want to do things, a biological trait that helped us survive as hunter gatherers, was having dopamine. Helping others by cooking or finding food for the pack and recieving social reward from that in the form of claps and congratulations strengthened the internal pathways for pleasure seeking behaviour in us humans. so, how does this relate to telling people our goals? Well, our brain can't tell the difference between the reward we give ourselves and others give us when we do something, vs say we going to do something. In other words, when we say we going to do something and our friends reward us with compliments, the same (most times more) amount of dopamine is released as when we actually do the goal. This is problematic, as before we have even started our goals, we have received the dopaminergic reactions in the brain that we associate with pleasure. The way our brain works, means that we chase more dopamine than the thing that happened before because that is just how we our wired, it is why people become addicted to things such as gambling placing higher and higher stakes on bets to reach a dopamine level that was higher than the one before when we win. So, if we have told people our goals before doing the goal, we have probably released an unattainable amount of dopamine compared to when we actually do the goal. Suddenly the goal seems uninteresting and you have lost your motivation to actually start doing because you have already received your reward. A bit like how in to todays age, where we can scroll on instagram giving us high dopamine hits after hits, Walking the dog, or chatting to your family, although interesting and fun, might give you half the amount of dopamine as scrolling on instagram, and so why would you stop scrolling? after all, you are wired to seek dopamine. So, the motivation to do other things that might better your life are easily pushed to the side because we can't reach the same levels of dopamine that scrolling on instagram gives us vs when we are walking the dog. The same is true for when we tell people our goals and then try to do the goals after, you just won't get the same level of dopamine.

So, next time you have a goal, start doing the goal before speaking about it, start walking before talking, and when you are walking or doing your goals, if your are going to tell people about your journey it is important you a far enough along the line that your telling people about what you have done, not what you are setting out to achieve. when you tell people about what you have done and you receive social reward such as compliments you receive dopamine, your brain re-enforces and strengthens the pathways in your mind that are creating that behaviour. Thus, you seek out the behaviour even more and motivation increases, you become addicted to doing and your life skyrockets quicker than you can imagine.