Why A Social Scientist Wants You To Make A Reverse Bucket List This Year

'Tis the season for resolutions and vision boards. With a new year on the horizon, it's common to reflect on your goals for the next 12 months—a relationship, a promotion, an adventure—and strategize various ways to follow through. 

It starts out just like a regular bucket list: "Make a list of all your worldly cravings and desires," Brooks explains on the mindbodygreen podcast. "The money you want, the stuff you want, the satisfaction that would come momentarily from the admiration of strangers, the Instagram followers…whatever Mother Nature is telling you would make you the big man on campus."

Write that desire down—then cross it out. "You might get it or you might not," Brooks adds. "The point is that you do not want your limbic system to be governing your ambitions." See, pleasure comes from the limbic system in your brain. It works fast, as it's where you experience dopamine surges, though it doesn't lead to long-lasting enjoyment. Your prefrontal cortex, however, operates much slower and more logically—so that's where you want sources of pleasure to remain, says Brooks. 

"You want your prefrontal cortex to say to you, 'That [desire] might come or it might not, but I will not tie my bliss to getting that particular reward,'" he explains. "Saying that is enormously freeing." And you subconsciously say that when you cross items off your bucket list. 

Essentially, a reverse bucket list is the opposite of manifesting. Rather than visualizing exactly what you want in life and how, exactly, you'll get there, you're deleting the goal from your conscious mind, thus freeing its power over your emotions. 

This doesn't mean you can't have goals; just don't fool yourself into feeling satisfied after you achieve those desires—our brains, after all, are hardwired to want more, more, more.