Depression, habenula, and the pitfalls of setting rigid goals

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 22:17:59 +0530

I recently visited my cousin after eons and had the fortune of spending some quality time. My cousin, who is about 17 years old, is full of life and quite chatty. Naturally, we discussed all sorts of things. During the conversation, he excitedly began sharing details about his fitness journey. He told me that he had started hitting the gym a few weeks ago and took great pride in the fact. While we were engaged in conversation, his mom interrupted us and began expressing her concerns over his behaviour.

My aunt told me that my cousin’s behaviour of late had been annoying her. When I asked what frustrated her, she remarked on how my cousin had refused to visit his grandmother on her birthday because he wouldn’t be able to meet his protein requirements, and how he had got riled up when she insisted that he join them.

Now, he interrupted his mom and started bragging about how consistent he had been. He told me that he did not want to skip his daily routine - which included going to the gym, walking a certain number of steps, eating a certain amount of protein, and so on - and that missing any of these things made him angry.

While I was genuinely happy for him - after all, he was trying to set higher standards and build healthier habits - his rigidity unsettled me. It reminded me of a pitfall that, based on my reading of Dr. Kyra Bobinet’s The Unstoppable Brain, he might be at risk of falling into, which is setting SMART goals (counting steps, calories, protein intake, tracking diet etc) that become unsustainable and defining success so narrowly that any deviation feels like failure.

Note: This is not a preachy post, nor is it a recommendation. I’m merely sharing Dr. Bobinet’s views on the pitfalls of SMART approaches to behaviour change, because I echo her sentiment and believe it's useful to know her view.

Before I continue, here's a quick intro of Dr. Bobinet taken from her website.

Kyra Bobinet, MD, MPH, has passionately pursued and studied the truth about behavior change for nearly three decades as a physician, public health leader, healthcare executive, and behavioral expert. An award-winning health innovator and thought leader, Dr. Bobinet has an MD from UCSF School of Medicine and an MPH from Harvard University. She belongs to the Stanford Medical School AIM lab, where she has taught on health behavior change, and is CEO/founder of Fresh Tri, a behavioral software company based on the latest neuroscience of habit formation and lasting change.

Let's admit - building a new habit is difficult, because it requires consistency and

discipline. Setting SMART goals is usually considered a good way to develop these (we'll explore later why). But Dr. Bobinet draws on her decades of experience as a behaviour-change expert to argue otherwise. In Unstoppable Brain, she contends that SMART approaches to habit building are performative in nature and argues that such approaches work only in the short term and can, in fact, be detrimental for long-term behaviour change.

To understand why they are not just ineffective, but often detrimental w.r.t long-term behaviour change, it's important to learn the neuroscience undergirding these approaches.

Dopamine & behaviour change

SMART goals are attractive because they are measurable, concrete, and directional. Pursuing these goals engages our reward system - dopamine pathways.

You set a goal, move towards it, and experience a sense of reward upon achieving the goal. At the end, you feel good about yourself, which makes you "learn" the behaviour. Repeating this enough times is likely to turn the behaviour into a habit.

Much of the discussion around behaviour change and habit formation has therefore focused on rewards, incentives, and the anticipation of achieving a desired outcome as a way to motivate behaviour.

But what's likely to happen when you don't achieve the goal? In other words, what happens when you fail, or rather, "perceive failure?" That's the very question Dr. Bobinet draws our attention to. Let's understand this by looking at a gut-wrenching experiment conducted on dogs by psychologists in the 1960s.

Learned helplessness

In the 1960s, psychologists Martin Seligman and Steven Maier conducted a series of experiments in which dogs were enclosed in a kennel and given electric shocks. Initially, the dogs squealed in pain, frantically moving back and forth and attempting to escape the cage, but after multiple attempts, they eventually stopped trying. Later, the scientists made it possible for the dogs to escape. What surprised them was that despite being in a situation to escape, many of the dogs simply gave up. Their earlier experience seemed to have taught them that there was nothing they could do to change their situation.

The phenomenon came to be known as learned helplessness. In the above example, the dogs learned to be helpless. This occurs when an individual repeatedly faces a negative or uncontrollable situation and stops changing their circumstances, even when they seemingly can do so. Dr. Bobinet calls this the know-do gap, which takes the following form

"I know what I should do, but I don't do it."

"Nothing I do makes a difference." etc

This is one of the signs of depression.

What's driving this attitude? THE HABENULA

Note: She highlights multiple studies like this one that discuss the role of habenula in depression.

Habenula, the motivation kill switch (borrowing her term)

Habenula is an ancient structure located in brain's epithalamus region. According to Dr. Bobinet, habenula is perhaps the most important controller of behaviour, and it's activated whenever we perceive failure. Since these ideas form the crux of my post,

I'd like to quote a few passages from the book in the sections that follow to convey Dr. Bobinet's message with fidelity.

"A half-centimeter area of our brain's epithalamus, this potent neuro-anatomical mechanism activates whenever there's perceived failure and then, often subconsciously downregulates one's motivation to try again"

PG 48
"When activated, habenula is a kill switch for our motivation. We stop trying new experiences or building healthy habits whenever we think we failed at, say, sticking to a diet or even controlling our anxiety."

The below is perhaps the most important insight of all.
PG 48
"Keep in mind that there is rarely absolute or terminal failure; mostly we experience perceived failure in terms of our behaviour change. But to habenula, they are the same thing."

Ex:Assume you set your mind on completing 10k steps everyday of the week. Now, being able to complete only 7k on a particular day is not a failure in any absolute terms. It's a failure only in relation to your goal of completing 10k everyday.

Dopamine & Habenula

Pg 49,

"The habenula's power over your behaviour is best illustrated by imagining that you are sitting in a car. The gas pedal represents your motivation and the concomitant dopamine that rewards you for pursuing goals. In fact, this "gas pedal" has been the focus of health improvement programs.............But what we all missed is - the brakes were on! The habenula acts like your brake pedal. And just like in a real car, you can floor the gas all you want, but if the brakes are on, you're not going anywhere. In other words, an activated habenula has more power over your behaviour than an activated reward system."

Essentially, failures register more strongly and painfully than successes feel rewarding. As a result, repeated failure to achieve a goal can undermine motivation far more powerfully than sporadic success can sustain it.

Note: Incidentally, I am reminded of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's loss aversion theory. Loss aversion is a psychological bias in which people prefer to avoid losses more than getting equivalent gains.

In her view, setting SMART goals often leads to relapse in behaviour because our environment can't be programmed to perfection every single day. Some days, you are sick. Another day, you have a commitment or a function to attend - as in my cousin's case. On some other day, you have less energy, etc. Therefore, a rigid mind that looks at success and failure as binary (10k steps success, anything less, I failed), is likely to suffer more - this can range from not pursuing the behaviour (lack of motivation) to becoming depressed (the detrimental bit).

Adapting to change, staying flexible, and iterating on our processes are key to long-term behaviour change, according to Dr. Bobinet. She has an entire chapter devoted to discussing these.

Conclusion

We are complex creatures and our brains work in fantastically complex ways. Neuroscience is still an evolving field, with scientists constantly coming up with new theories, experiments, and models to unpack the mysteries of our brain. Whenever new theories with better explanatory power and experimental evidence relating to a phenomenon emerge, it's worth paying attention to them. This in no way implies that the newer theory has the final word w.r.t explaining the phenomenon.

This is not limited to Neuroscience, but rather to the scientific enterprise as a whole. [Atomic theory, standard model, big-bang cosmology, computational theory of mind etc]. You name it.

That's the spirit in which we must construe Dr. Bobinet's take about habit change and behaviour formation as well. And she's not even decrying SMART approaches in a blanket manner.

In her own words. The below quote captures the essence of her argument.

"I personally have nothing against goals, awards, or performances. I celebrate incredible human achievements and breathtaking feats as much as the next person. But performance mindsets, if used inflexibly, for the same individual or organization, have been proven to cause harm eventually. This is because they are best for sprinting but not for marathoning."

If SMART approaches to building habits have worked for you, there's perhaps no reason for you to change. But if they have not worked, there's value in understanding Dr. Bobinet's view and developing an iterative mindset. At the end of the day, if we start enjoying the process, without having rigid definitions of success or failure, we are likely to develop healthier habits and foster long-term behaviour change.