Is Goal Setting Bad For Your Health? Part I
Is Goal Setting Bad For Your Health? -Part I
I have come across an interesting concept while discussing goal setting with peers. The idea was raised that:
By making goals, you are setting yourself up for failure.
Have you ever encountered this? Either personally or as a concept?
Most successful entrepreneurs out there teach that we should set goals regularly, and that we should write them down. Further, depending on whose philosophy you follow, goals should be more or less specific, with steps on how to get there and a time frame. They also entail visualizing, affirmations, and a whole industry’s worth of techniques.
This idea that setting a goal will lead one to failure is actually something I have experienced myself - as recent as this past year. I had about three goals I had set out for myself to accomplish by the end of the year 2007. Come review time, I was dreading looking at that list because I knew I had not completed what I had wanted to do. In fact, I had not even started on a couple of them.
Did I feel like a failure? You bet I did. I felt utterly depressed for several days leading up to the impending end of the year whenever I thought about it or took a look at my list. The thought that I had “not done anything” popped up in my mind and feelings of “what’s the point?” made themselves felt on numerous occasions during that times.
So is Goal setting bad for your health? Are you setting yourself up for failure?
Well, let’s consider the argument so far:
- I set out to complete 3 goals and wrote them out with a time frame (end of year).
- Come End-Of-Year, the goals were not done, 2 of which were not started.
- As a result of not accomplishing my goals, I felt depressed, had unproductive, negative thoughts, felt the exercise of goal setting to be pointless, and felt angry at myself for failing.
- The mental stress translated into physical apathy and lethargy.
- It is now a known fact that stress and anxiety have direct detrimental effect on the physical body on a cellular level, speeding the aging process and, in cases of habitual or extreme stress being present over prolonged time, can be a cause of cancer.
Therefore: By writing down goals and not accomplishing them, I did set myself up for failure, and experienced a number of mental and physical stressful effect as a result.
Conclusion: Goal Setting IS bad for your health.
… All right… 
Now that we have proven this argument, let’s look at it again, this time coming from another perspective.
Stay tuned for Part II of Is Goal Setting Bad For Your Health?
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