How Harnessing the Power of Your Brain Can Help You Stay Motivated All Year to Crush Your Goals

You may be the kind of person who starts out the year motivated and ready to crush every single personal and professional goal you set. It’s truly a great feeling — a whole new year stretched out in front of you, loaded with possibilities. You’re psyched. You’re ready to go.

Making a plan, working hard, learning new skills, and staying focused are essential ingredients needed to reach your goals, but one of the most important things you will need is motivation. A lack of motivation can bring progress to a screeching halt, make you procrastinate, keep you stuck, cause you to doubt yourself, and take you far off the path to achieving those goals.

How do you keep that pumped-up, energized feeling going and stay motivated to make the right choices and behave in a way, day in and day out, that is going to get you to your goals as the months go by?

When you understand the basics of neuroscience and how your brain works, you can hack the reward system in your brain to stay motivated all year long until you cross the finish line to your goals.

At the most basic level, our brains are programmed to avoid pain and seek pleasure. It’s how our ancestors were motivated to find food, shelter, and mating opportunities. It’s all tied to your brain’s reward circuit and the neurotransmitter dopamine. Physically, dopamine gives your brain energy, motivation, a rush, and that “switched-on” feeling — like your first cup of coffee in the morning.

Dopamine is behind all human reward-seeking behavior. 

You can think of it as governing “movement” — physically and motivationally. It determines “salience” or how important something is to your brain. In an evolutionary context, it rewards us for beneficial behaviors and motivates us to repeat them.