Toward the end of the year, many of us commit to ambitious, concrete goals like cutting your screen time in half or running three miles every morning.
That approach often backfires, according to neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff, PhD.
Linear goals like these are popular because they give people “the illusion of certainty,” according to Le Cunff, author of “Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World.”
“They make us feel like we’re in control, because we think that if we have a clear vision and a clear plan, and we execute on that plan, then we’re going to be successful,” she tells CNBC Make It.
But real life rarely adheres to our best-laid plans, which is why so many people end up repeating their New Year’s resolutions “over and over again every year” without making progress, she says.
Instead, she recommends approaching your goals with an “experimental mindset.” Just like scientists collect data and use the results to inform their next choices, “you can do the exact same thing with your career and your life in general.”
If you’re hoping to start a new routine this year, Le Cunff recommends conducting “tiny experiments” with the habits you’d like to try, instead of setting lofty, unrealistic goals.
How to create a ‘tiny experiment’
Tiny experiments follow a very simple formula, according to Le Cunff: “I will [do X action] for [Y duration].”
Some examples could be “I will write 250 words every day for two weeks,” or, “I will take a walk on my lunch break every day for one month.”
One of Le Cunff’s favorites is, “I will not bring my phone into my bedroom for one week.”
A good tiny experiment meets four criteria, according to Le Cunff: It must be “purposeful, actionable, continuous and trackable.”
To be purposeful, the experiment has to involve something you are “deeply curious about,” Le Cunff says, and an actionable experiment is one that you can conduct “right now with your current resources.”
It’s crucial to run the experiment continuously in order to collect enough data, she explains, and tracking your consistency will help you determine how well the experiment is working for you.
The key is to “withhold judgment until you’re done conducting your experiment,” Le Cunff says. Trying something new can be uncomfortable, but that’s part of the process.
After the experiment is over, you can decide whether or not you would like to incorporate that action into your daily life. “You can actually use experiments as a gateway to discover new habits that work for you,” Le Cunff says.
Why this approach works
Many of us have a tendency “to always want to go for the bigger, more impressive, more ambitious version of a goal,” Le Cunff says, but that mentality has several pitfalls. For one, long-ranging goals like “I will work out every day this year” or “I will read one book a week” are often “too overwhelming or unrealistic.”
Announcing your impressive goal to other people gives your brain a “big dopamine hit,” Le Cunff says, but that can paradoxically reduce your motivation to achieve it. After all, “we already got the reward of people telling us, ‘Oh wow, you’re so strong, you’re so ambitious.'”
By contrast, telling others ‘I’m going to jog twice a week for one month’ may sound less impressive than ‘I’m going to run every day for the next year,’ but “then you actually get the very healthy dopamine at the end from actually having done the thing,” Le Cunff says.
Tiny experiments help shift people from an outcome-based mindset to a curious, explorative one. With this perspective, “success is not reaching a particular milestone that you have defined in advance. Success is learning something new,” she says.
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