Dr. Emily Balcetis on Using Vision to Set and Achieve Goals

High-Level Overview

Andrew Huberman, a vision scientist, talks with Dr. Emily Balcetis, a professor of psychology at New York University whose lab studies motivation, goal setting and goal pursuit, and author of Clear, Closer, Better: How Successful People See the World. Their conversation centers on one surprising idea: how we literally see a goal, whether it looks near or far and whether a hill looks steep or gentle, strongly shapes how much energy we bring to it. Balcetis explains a simple visual technique of narrowing attention like a spotlight that made exercise faster and less painful in her studies, why vision boards can backfire, how planning for obstacles builds motivation, why our bodies' energy levels change how the world looks, and how tracking data corrects the distorted memories we use to judge our progress.

The tone is warm, curious and practical. Huberman adds neuroscience context about the visual system, arousal and dopamine, while Balcetis mixes research findings with personal stories, including learning to play one song on the drums while writing her book and caring for a newborn. The conversation moves from lab experiments to real-world tools, then to cognitive goals, memory and mental health.

The Discussion Explores:

• Why common motivation tactics burn us out, and the search for more automatic strategies built on vision
• The narrowed "spotlight" of attention used by elite runners, and lab results showing faster, less painful exercise
• The goal gradient effect: animals and people work harder as a goal gets closer, and how to create that feeling on purpose
• Why vision boards and goal lists can backfire, and a better process that includes planning for obstacles
• How body states such as fatigue, weight and energy change how far and steep the world looks
• Micro-goals, caffeine and conscious control of visual attention
• Tracking cognitive goals with data to correct faulty memory, using apps and a drumming experiment
• Visual attention and mental health, including priming in depression and anxiety

Deep Dive into Main Ideas

Why vision is a better motivation tool than willpower

Balcetis says that when psychologists ask people how they make progress on goals, the usual answers are encouraging self-talk, reminding themselves why the goal matters, and sticking Post-it notes around the house. The problem is that all of those are effortful, and so become goals in their own right. People start strong and then fall away well before the halfway point. Her team went looking for strategies that could be automated, and landed on vision, since sighted people look at the world constantly without thinking about it. They began by exploring visual illusions and whether people could be taught to see things differently.

Huberman agrees, noting that vision is the dominant sense we use to navigate the world, and that anything stable in our visual environment, like a note on the fridge, eventually becomes invisible to us. Later in the episode Balcetis explains why she thinks vision is special: it takes up more of the brain's cortex than any other sense, we trust what we see over what we hear when the two conflict, and unlike our hearing, taste or touch, our eyes are rarely corrected by others. That naive trust is why optical illusions such as "the dress" or the horse-seal drawing cause such uproar, and why reshaping what we see can reshape how we feel about a task.

The spotlight technique: elite runners and everyday people

Because health and exercise top New Year's resolutions every year, Balcetis started there. At a YMCA in an old Brooklyn armory, she met an elite running team that included an Olympic 400-meter gold medalist. She expected them to track everything around them, competitors, the periphery, who was behind them. Instead they said they did the opposite: they narrow their focus, "almost like a spotlight is shining on a target." For short races that target is the finish line; for longer ones it's a sub-goal like the shorts of the runner ahead or a landmark. Faster runners reported using it more. Her team found a similar link among hundreds of competitive New York Road Runners.

Then they tested whether ordinary people could learn it. Participants wore ankle weights equal to about 15 percent of their body weight and high-stepped to a finish line. Some were taught to imagine a spotlight on the finish line and ignore everything else; others were told to look around naturally. Those using the narrowed focus "were able to move 27% faster" and said "it hurt 17% less," even though the task was identical. Balcetis says the lesson is to pick a target just ahead, such as a stop sign two blocks away, focus on it as if wearing blinders, and choose the next one once you reach it. It worked for everyone, she says, whether they were in shape or not.

Huberman asks how often to reset the spotlight, since doing it constantly would be exhausting. Balcetis says the elite interviewees were mostly sprinters. Long-distance runners use the technique strategically, relying on a wider view early on and switching to a narrowed focus increasingly after about the halfway point of, say, a 10-kilometer race, when motivation fades. They use it most intensely for the final push. The spotlight is best imagined as a circle of light on one point, such as the spot in your lane where you'll cross the line. She cites marathon champion Joan Benoit Samuelson, who described focusing on the shorts of a runner ahead until she passed them, then resetting.

The goal gradient and the illusion of proximity

Balcetis traces the science back to rat and mouse studies from the 1940s and 1950s. Hungry or thirsty rats ran faster as they neared the end of a maze, and harnessed mice pulled harder as they got closer to food, even though they had little energy to spare. Studies in humans found the same pattern, known as the goal gradient hypothesis: "The closer you get to the goal, generally the harder people and animals work to finish that goal."

Her insight was to ask whether you could create that feeling of closeness artificially. Narrowing attention does exactly that: when people measure or visually match distances, the finish line looks closer to those using the spotlight. That illusion of proximity then drives the extra effort and the sense that the task was easier than expected. Her randomized experiments show this is causal, not just a trait of naturally good runners, so anyone can train it. Huberman adds that narrowing the visual window likely also changes how we perceive time, like switching from a coarse strobe to high-speed photography.

Why vision boards backfire and what to do instead

Huberman asks whether visual tools can help people get started, not just finish. Balcetis turns to vision boards, dream boards and goal lists. They can help people figure out what they want, which is valuable, but research by her NYU colleague Gabriele Oettingen shows that vividly imagining how great life will be once you achieve something doesn't help you achieve it. Fantasizing about success acts like a goal already satisfied. Oettingen's team found that systolic blood pressure, which Balcetis describes as an indicator of the body's readiness to act, actually drops after people indulge in these positive fantasies. The body relaxes when it should be preparing to take the first step. Huberman connects this to dopamine and a cardiologist friend's theory that people who announce they're writing a book get so much praise upfront that they never write it.

Balcetis isn't telling people to stop making dream boards, but says goal setting shouldn't end there. First, turn the abstract goal into a concrete path: what can you accomplish in the next two weeks, and the two weeks after that? Second, and often overlooked, identify the obstacles that stand in your way and plan for them in advance. "If you were on a boat and the boat started to sink, that's not the time you want to start looking for life jackets." When an obstacle hits, you'll be short on time and resources and anxious, and "We're not going to do our best thinking when we're in crisis mode."

Her favorite example is Michael Phelps at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Going for a record eighth gold medal in the 200-meter butterfly, his goggles filled with water, leaving him swimming blind. He didn't panic, because he and his coach had rehearsed that scenario, with his coach even taking his goggles away in practice. Phelps had a plan: count his strokes, since he knew exactly how many it took to cross the pool. He won the race.

Micro-goals that challenge without overwhelming

Huberman, who does 100 jumping jacks during his morning sunlight routine, asks whether it matters how we divide up a goal, by steps, strokes, songs or counts of ten. Balcetis says there's no one prescription; people need to be honest about where they are. Someone new to an exercise might aim for groups of 10, because hitting each milestone delivers a small hit of pleasure and accomplishment that carries them through the next hard stretch. The key is calibration: "We want to set a goal that will challenge us, but isn't impossible." A goal that's too easy, like one jumping jack, gives no sense of achievement; one that's just beyond what feels possible, like 25 and then another 25, gives the boost needed to go further.

How your body changes what you see

Balcetis describes research from her lab and others showing that the body's state alters perception. For people who are chronically tired, older, overweight or wearing a heavy backpack, "Distances look further and hills look steeper." Her team tested this with a double-blind experiment. Participants drank Kool-Aid sweetened either with sugar or with Splenda, and couldn't tell which. After giving the sugar time to raise blood glucose, those who had received real energy saw the finish line of an exercise task as closer. As she puts it, "if you have more energy, the world looks easier."

This matters for motivation because when a walk or a hill looks harder, people are primed to expect failure and may not even start. The good news, she says, is that the spotlight technique helped everyone in her studies, regardless of fitness or weight. Huberman notes that caffeine and other stimulants raise arousal, dilate the pupils and narrow the visual window, and wonders about combining a healthy amount of caffeine with something like a hoodie that acts as blinders. Balcetis says she can't drink caffeine because it makes her jittery, so she drinks decaf, and that in her studies simply believing you're energized produced similar effects. Huberman adds that "The visual aperture is under our conscious control," and suggests imagining how your attention narrows when a very exciting or troubling text arrives.

Tracking cognitive goals: the drumming experiment

For non-physical goals, Balcetis tells a personal story. When her son was born, the same month she was pulling her book together, she felt she had lost her sense of self and decided to become a one-hit-wonder drummer, learning a single song despite considering herself uncoordinated. She booked a public show as a deadline. As she practiced around a baby, a job and a book, she felt she was making no progress and even cried over it.

The problem, she realized, was relying on memory, which levels and sharpens our past rather than recording it accurately. So she decided "I should stop relying on my brain to tell me where am I at?" She used the Reporter app to ping her twice a day with questions about whether she'd practiced and how she felt. After a month, she found "my memory was totally wrong": she had practiced far more than she remembered, and her emotional ratings showed a clear upward trend, including a compliment from her drummer husband that she'd dismissed. Seeing the data meant "I became a more accurate accountant of my own progress," which is essential for adjusting goals and deadlines. She played the show and has since been asked to play her one song again.

She also recommends the 1 Second Everyday app, which records one second of video a day and stitches them into a montage. The creator told her one of his most meaningful clips is a second of a plain brick wall, the first thing he saw after learning a family member might die, which reminds him how precious life is. Huberman notes how the brain packs whole experiences into symbols like that wall, and says he plans to use the app to record his morning sunlight viewing. Huberman also asks about tools that highlight words or lines while reading; Balcetis mentions her brother-in-law's research suggesting that highlighting parts of words helps people learning English as a second language.

Vision, depression and where attention goes

Huberman asks whether these tools could help people with depression, where low energy makes everything look harder and confirms a negative worldview. Balcetis says her lab hasn't tested the spotlight technique for this, calling it an opportunity for other scientists. But research over decades shows that people with depression or anxiety have their attention captured by things that reinforce their mood, a process called priming. If you believe the world is threatening, you notice threats, which heightens anxiety and narrows attention further, creating a vicious cycle.

Some interventions ask people to search grids of faces for the smiling ones for about 10 minutes. This has been shown to improve people's sense of what they can accomplish and to make them feel a bit more energized. "It doesn't cure depression," she stresses, but it can produce a temporary shift that might help someone begin climbing out of a rut.

Can deliberate attention change the brain itself?

In closing, Huberman asks whether paying closer attention to the details of a target adds anything beyond a quick visual snapshot. Balcetis points to neuroscience studies using transparent overlaid images of a face and a house. The eyes take in both, but when people choose to focus on the face, the fusiform face area, a region specialized for faces, becomes more active; when they focus on the house, that activity declines and other areas engage. Choosing what to attend to changes the brain's response, which she sees as evidence that with intention and practice we can change how we experience the world. Huberman shares that he used the spotlight during a run in New York and found he ran fastest in the final stretch.

Conclusion

Dr. Balcetis offers a refreshing alternative to willpower-heavy motivation: change what you see. Narrowing your attention to a nearby target makes goals look closer, which makes people work harder and hurt less, and that technique worked for everyone in her studies regardless of fitness. At the same time, she warns that dreaming about success can relax the body instead of preparing it, so real goal setting needs concrete short-term steps and a rehearsed plan for obstacles, just as Michael Phelps had when his goggles filled with water. Micro-goals should be challenging but possible, and progress on any goal, physical or mental, should be judged with data rather than faulty memory. Together with Huberman's neuroscience, the episode delivers a set of practical, science-backed, zero-cost tools for anyone trying to start, sustain or finish something hard.

This is a summary of "Tools for Setting & Achieving Goals | Dr. Emily Balcetis" from Huberman Lab, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST. Listen to the full episode.