Dr. Emily Balcetis: Tools for Setting & Achieving Goals

Proximity to a goal increases the investment in resources that people, that animals, use to meet that goal, even when they don't have that much to spare.

They call that the Goal-Gradient Hypothesis—the closer you get to the goal, generally, the harder people and animals work to finish that goal.

They looked at people who experience chronic fatigue, the elderly, people who are overweight ... What happens to their perceptions of the environment? Well, what they find is that distances look further to those that are overweight, chronically tired, older rather than younger, weighted down with extra baggage. Distances look further, and hills look steeper.

That's what's happening, visually, when we create that narrowed focus of attention. When we tell people, imagine there's a spotlight on the shorts of the person up ahead or the stop sign that you're seeing, it induces an illusion of proximity that then is responsible for people trying harder, walking faster, feeling that it defied their expectations, and that it wasn't as bad as they thought it would be.

...A third, often overlooked or under-appreciated, stage that has to happen in the goal-setting process, and that's thinking about the obstacles that stand in your way of success, and that will actually help improve motivation in the long run.

We want to set a goal that will challenge us but isn't impossible. We don't want to set goals that are too easy, because we're not going to trick ourselves into feeling so great about doing 1 jumping jack.

They have looked at the relationship between anxiety, depression, and visual experience and found, over decades, evidence that people with depression or with anxiety, what their attention is captured by within the bigger global surrounding world are those things that are negative or reinforcing of their worldview.