How to Set and Crush Your Goals With Way Less Stress

Goals can be stressful. They can create excessive pressure and make us feel bad when we don't achieve the ones we've set. This is particularly true if goals are unrealistically high or we don't have a workable plan in place.

This is why many people forgo setting New Year's resolutions entirely. It's difficult to keep going after our goals if we keep missing the mark each year. It's also much harder to reach our goals when we don't know the best way to go about setting them and working toward them.

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The Role of Goals and Stress Relief

What we experience as ‘stress’ is really an interaction of events that happen in our lives, our thoughts, and resulting emotional reactions to those events.

Because of this, a significant goal of stress management focuses on examining our thoughts about our stressors. By doing this, we can then change our feelings and our stress responses. Another goal of stress management involves minimizing the stressors we experience in a typical day. Both goals are important and both require some forethought.

The Role of Goals in Personal Happiness

Another area of life that’s closely linked with stress and stress management is personal happiness and fulfillment. The growing field of positive psychology examines what factors contribute to happiness and resilience (rather than just studying unhappiness and pathology).

This line of research has identified several goals that, if met, can lead to greater overall happiness, fulfillment, and resilience to stress. So, rather than only setting goals that minimize or manage stress, setting goals that lead to the opposite of stress can also be an effective route to a less-stressed lifestyle.

What Goals Should I Set?

So, how do we decide what kind of goals will be most beneficial for us? It's often a matter of looking at what we need or want to accomplish.

• If you’re feeling stressed to the point of being overwhelmed, it’s a good idea to focus your goals more on minimizing and managing stress.
• If you’re feeling general stress—but nothing too severe—and are finding a general lack of fulfillment and happiness, it’s a good idea to set some stress management goals while also focusing on goals that promote happiness and meaning in​​ life.

No matter what type of goals we are setting, they should provide some degree of stress relief. It’s a good idea to become aware of which goals will lead to both outcomes. Below are some different categories of goals we may set.

How to Maintain Goals

Some goals are short-term, such as acing a test, finishing a project at work, or finding a great relationship. However, many goals that will help with stress management, happiness, and resilience tend to be ongoing, long-term goals such as regular exercise, maintaining relationships, and practicing meditation on an ongoing basis.

Longer-term goals can be somewhat more challenging. However, these goals are often rewarding to maintain and are ultimately what can lead to a better life experience.

There are a few tricks to maintaining goals or adopting healthy habits. Some things that you can do that will help:

1. Set the right goals.
2. Take small, concrete steps.
3. Reward yourself along the way.
4. Consider slip-ups to be part of the process.

Maintaining goals can be a little more involved than that, but this is the basic process. Most people abandon goals because they set their goals too high (or the wrong goals for their lifestyle), try to do too much in the beginning, don’t congratulate themselves for making progress toward their goals along the way, and give up if they have a slip.