#27: Your new year resolutions survival guide
Is the new year a good time to make some positive changes in your life? Or are new year resolutions a bit ... you know, cliched? And if you do decide to make some resolutions, how do you choose them? Your imperfect friend is here to hold your hand and guide you through it all. We're going to look at why, psychologically, new year is a pretty good time to make some changes, and why cynicism about new year resolutions is understandable, but overblown. We're also going to look at how you can dig down into any resolutions you've been toying with and get to the heart of what you really care about, so that you can focus your new year efforts in the right place.
Find the '5 whys' exercise here.
Reference:
Hengchen Dai, Katherine L. Milkman, Jason Riis. 2014: 'The Fresh Start Effect: Temporal Landmarks Motivate Aspirational Behavior', Management Science 60/10:2563-2582.
Episode transcript:
If the idea of new year resolutions stresses you out, this is for you.
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Should new year resolutions be part of your life? I’m guessing that you have views about new year resolutions. You might have made some. You might have at least thought about making some. You might feel scornful about them, and be - for one of a variety of reasons - opposed to the idea. I’m going to talk about new year resolutions in this episode. Specifically, is it a good idea to make them? And, if so, how do you settle on some good ones?
There are, broadly, 2 issues I’m going to address. The first has to do with the resolutions themselves; that is, your decision about which - if any - changes you decide you’d like to make. The second has to do with the ‘new year’ bit; with the significance of latching on to the new year as a time to make important changes. I’ll talk about these issues in reverse order.
There’s a long tradition of making new year resolutions. Lots of us do it. But there’s also a lot of cynicism about it. You know the sort of thing - the idea of people joining a gym or starting a healthy diet in January, but then never going within a hundred metres of a treadmill or a stick of celery by March. This cynicism, too, goes way back. Writing on 1st January 1863, Mark Twain remarked, ‘ Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual’.
Beside the observation that for lots of people, new year resolutions are forgotten by mid-January, there are some good reasons for cynicism about them. One is the thought that, if you’re willing to wait until the new year before you implement some positive change, than making that change can’t really be very important to you. If it was important, you’d have done it already. Waiting for the new year is a way of stalling for time so you can postpone making a change that secretly you’d rather not make. Another reason to be cynical about new year resolutions is the thought that if you’re serious about self-improvement, you’d be thinking about it throughout the year, not just at the beginning of January. Embracing the idea of new year resolutions amounts to accepting that reflecting on your life and making positive changes is something that you do at the start of the year, before you lapse into bad habits and pursue them unreflectively until the next new year rolls around. And yet another reason is - especially keeping in mind the things I’ve just mentioned - making a big fanfare about your good intentions by tying them to the new year is a good way to set yourself up for failure. If you’re going to make improvements, isn’t it better just to get on with them quietly when the time is right, whether or not it coincides with the new year?
This sort of cynicism is understandable, to an extent. Even so, there are some good reasons to use the new year to inspire positive changes in your life. One has to do with what psychologists have called the ‘fresh start effect’. In a 2014 paper, Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman, and Jason Riis showed that people are more motivated to set goals and work towards them following ‘salient temporal landmarks’, like the new year, or a birthday, or a new term. It turns out that we compartmentalise our lives into different ‘mental accounting periods’ that begin with these landmark moments. That makes it natural for us to consign bad habits that we’d like to change to the ‘old me’, and move forward into a new phase where we do things differently. So, using the new year as a hook on which to hang your good intentions is actually a pretty good strategy, given our psychology.
At the same time, though, let’s not be all-or-nothing about this. The new year isn’t your only opportunity to benefit from the fresh start effect. The start of the month, the start of a week, the first day of spring - these are all, to varying extents, salient temporal landmarks that you can use to kick off your good intentions. So if this new year isn’t a good time for you, you don’t need to wait until the next one to make positive changes in your life. What’s more, though - you can make positive changes without tying them to a temporal landmark. The fresh start effect is one tool that you can use to help motivate you, but it’s not the only tool. Sometimes we’re successful at making important positive changes on an otherwise unremarkable day, and sometimes, looking back, we might not even remember when we made a particular change, or whether there was any particular moment when it happened. This is how it’s been for me a few times: I stopped drinking alcohol some time in February or March last year, and I stopped eating meat some time between the ages of 14 and 15, but I can’t recall the exact date for either of them. Don’t be surprised if this is how it is for you, too. Sometimes our behaviour changes before we form an explicit intention to make a change - in the examples I mentioned, by the time I made the decisions not to drink alcohol any more and not to eat meat any more, I’d already moved away from those things. Coordinate your goal-setting with temporal landmarks if you think it might work for you - but don’t let it constrain you.
So, anyway. Psychologically, the new year can be a good time to make changes - although not the only good time. It’s worth mentioning a few other reasons why we can be overly cynical about new year resolutions. Let’s take the observation that, notoriously, lots of people who make new year resolutions run out of steam pretty quickly and abandon their resolutions. Seems like a pretty good reason to give new year resolutions a wide berth, right? Well, not necessarily. Here’s where the phenomenon of new year resolutions have become a victim of their own success. There’s a selection effect operating here. Making new year resolutions is such a huge and well-established cultural phenomenon that lots of people make them even if they don’t feel strongly motivated to change. And since they’re not strongly motivated to change, they don’t stick with their resolutions. They buy a cut-price gym membership on impulse in January and go along for a couple of zumba classes before abandoning the idea. People like that are why there are new year cut price gym memberships in the first place. They don’t stick with their resolutions because they weren’t seriously committed to them in the first place, and that gives substance to the bad reputation that new year resolutions have. But that doesn’t mean that new year resolutions won’t work for people who are seriously motivated to change - and that includes you. Let’s face it, you’re listening to a podcast episode about whether you ought to be making new year resolutions. You’re already taking it seriously.
Now, what about that final worry - that by making a song and dance about your good intentions by linking them to the new year is setting yourself up for failure? Well, what constitutes a ‘failure’ in these circumstances, and why are you so worried about it? I’ve talked before on this podcast about how it’s a big mistake to view goals primarily as opportunities to fail, about how you’re missing out if you’re viewing them that way, and about what to do instead - that was episode #21: Let’s talk about lists, plans, and goals. Basically, if you find yourself shying away from making goals because you’re worried that you won’t attain them, you’re doing it all wrong. You need to listen to that episode, if you haven’t already.
And this brings us on to the content of the resolutions you make. You need to pick your goals carefully. Because they should be important and meaningful, right? How can you best go about working out what will work for you, and what will give you the best value for money in terms of helping you realise the sort of life you want? Well, I’m going to guess that since you’re listening to this podcast, you’re not totally stumped about what sort of changes you want to make in your life. You have some ideas. Maybe you want to get fit. Maybe you want to create some boundaries around your work life. Whatever they might be, the goal you have in mind is not the whole story. There’s a reason why that goal is important to you, and getting clear about that reason - about the ‘goal behind the goal’ - is helpful in deciding upon a resolution. A useful and simple tool you can use for this is a ‘5 whys’ analysis, a technique originally used by the Toyota corporation as a way of identifying the root causes of problems in the manufacturing process. To use it to help identify why your goals are important to you, take your candidate goal - for example, ‘get fit’ - and simply ask: why? Why is this goal important? Once you have your answer, ask ‘why?’ again. And so on, until you’ve done it 5 times. ‘5 times’ is a bit arbitrary, of course - it could be more or fewer - but the idea is that with each iteration, you get a little closer to something foundational, some bedrock value or need. Perhaps the answer to the question ‘why do I want to get fit?’ is, ‘I want to feel better about the way I look’, and perhaps the answer to why that’s important is ‘I want to feel more confident’, and then ‘I want to be able to ask for what I need and make sure I get it’, and perhaps ultimately, ‘I want to have my own needs and desires acknowledged as important by me and by the people around me’. Why is it important to dig down in this way, to uncover the foundational goal that lies behind the resolutions that we’re considering making? Well, because it could turn out that the resolutions you’re considering making are not the most effective way to attain your foundational goal. To return to our example, although we found that the surface-level goal of losing weight was underpinned by the more foundational goal of getting better at asserting our needs, working towards the goal of losing weight is probably not a particularly effective way of achieving the goal of getting better at asserting your needs. That might be familiar to you if you’ve ever tried to lose weight for reasons to do with confidence: you might start out thinking that if only you could lose a few kilos you’d be bursting with confidence, and then you lose a few kilos but find that it’s not the magic bullet you’d hoped it would be. By getting clear about why you’re trying to do what you’re trying to do, you can go straight to the important bit. Maybe losing weight isn’t the best route to getting better at asserting your needs, but practising asking for what you need - even when it’s uncomfortable - may well be a promising route. Give the 5 whys a go with your resolutions. If it’s helpful to have a template and a brief recap of how to do it, you can find one on the ‘Resources’ page of The Academic Imperfectionist website - there’s a link in the episode notes.
Now, while you’re reflecting on what goals to set for yourself, there’s another way that you can turn the fresh start effect to your advantage. Remember, a fresh start happens when you come to the end of one mental accounting period. That happens in spades at new year: culturally, not only is it a time for making plans for the year ahead, it’s also a time for taking stock of the past year. How do you feel about the last year? What went well for you? What would you like to do more of? What inspired you? Where did you hold yourself back? What life would you be living if you weren’t so afraid? Those reflections you’ve been having on the past year have already got you thinking about the values and aspirations that underlie the choices you make. You’ve already been lifting the lid on your motivations. You’re in exactly the right place to make insights about where to go next.
Have a good 2022, imperfectionists.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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