How to keep your New Year's Resolutions
How to keep your New Year's Resolutions
Issue 100: The psychology of why people fail to achieve their New Year's Resolutions & how to keep yours + we share our own resolutions for 2024
With a new year on the horizon, many people are thinking about the changes they want to make in their lives. New year's resolutions are a 4,000 year old tradition dating back to the ancient Babylonians, but despite centuries of practice roughly 80% of peoples still fail to keep their resolutions by February, and only 8% stick with them for the entire year.
While pondering our own resolutions, we drafted some advice on how not to fail at keeping your New Year’s Resolutions for TIME Magazine last year. So, what can we do differently to actually stick to our resolutions?
At this time of year, advice columns offer all kinds of recommendations for leveraging your willpower to meet your goals. Dream Big! Commit yourself! Give yourself a medal! (and those are just the tips from Harvard Medical School). Yet much of the advice we’re given often fails badly.
Psychologists who study self-control have found that the best approach for achieving goals is called "situation change." This means avoiding temptation by changing your surroundings and environment, rather than relying on our rather flimsy willpower to resist it.
Situation change can involve removing tempting foods from your home if you are trying to diet, deleting social media apps if you are trying to reduce your screen time, or blocking off time on your calendar for specific goals.
Situation change also involves paying attention to your social circumstances and leveraging the influence of those around you to help achieve your goals. For example, joining a writing group can provide accountability and support for aspiring writers.
We did this ourselves when we were writing our book, “The Power of Us.” We set weekly meetings, blocking off time to write together. We met in cafés to argue over stories, studies, and turns of phrase. Working together created both social accountability and social support.
This also seems to work nicely for physical activities. For instance, “Runners who had group activities in January 2022 recorded 78 percent more active time than those who ran solo.” Working out with others has at least three significant benefits: accountability, support, and community. In other words, you’ll be in better shape and build friends at the same time!
Larger groups can create social norms that push us in the direction of our goals. For instance, we have joined book clubs and writing clubs to help us read more books and stick to our writing goals. Indeed, the social norms of these groups are an essential ingredient for collective success.
In one recent study, researchers compared whether establishing a social norm against using technology in class would help university students resist the temptation to multitask while listening to lectures. They found that students who were in a course with a clear social norm against using technology spent only about 10% of their time multitasking, compared to 24% for students who had personal resolutions not to use technology.
Social norms clearly trumped willpower!
Moreover, students in the course with a social norm against technology even reported fewer urges to use their phones or computers during class and experienced less of a need for willpower to resist temptation. We have found the same thing with cooperation: A group with the right norms makes it easier to achieve your goals.
So when you create a New Year’s Resolution this year, we suggest that you think more deeply about how your good intentions can be supported (or undermined) by groups and their norms. You might form a running group with friends, start a book club with coworkers, join a local environmental organization, or attend regular meditation meet-ups.
Of course, there is also the possibility that some of the groups you belong to have norms that contradict the goal you have set for yourself. If you want to reduce your alcohol consumption, for instance, you might need to avoid hanging out with your drinking buddies. Spend a little less time in their company and more in the presence of people whose own behaviors align with your intentions.
This provides a few guidelines for how our groups can help us become the best version of ourselves:
Set your goals (and ensure your goals are concrete)
Join a group with norms that aligns with your goals (and leave groups that don’t)
Help create healthy social norms in groups you belong to
Track your achievements—and celebrate collectively when you succeed!
And let us know how these tips work for you. We would love to hear any great examples of people who leveraged the power of group dynamics to achieve their goals.
To read our full article in TIME, click here for the link.
Reflecting on 2023 + Our New Year’s Resolutions
Jay: Last year I had the goal to write another book. I made a lot of progress, but it’s taking a bit longer than expected. This year my goal is to say “no” to a lot of the distractions (like academic conferences and university visits) that soak up my writing time—and time with my family. To quote Steve Jobs, “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are.” My wife is excellent at helping me say no to various distractions.
Dom: Last year, I started to dabble with photography. In 2024, I am resolved to devote more focused time to improving my skills — especially at composition, which is not my strong suit. Following our own advice, I am planning to join a local photography group and perhaps also take a class. More generally, I want to pay more attention to the living, breathing world around me, and less to worlds mediated through a screen.
Yvonne: In last year’s resolutions newsletter, I declared that 2023 would be “the year of friendship”. I made 2 new friends in 2023, and definitely reconnected with some old friends as well! 2024 will be “the year of writing.” I picked up some freelance gigs towards the end of this year and expanded my topic areas to writing about climate justice, and I want to keep the momentum strong. I’ve also been working on a long-form narrative essay for the past five months and aim to publish it in 2024. Finding the right home for it will be a challenge for next year.
Let us know what your goals are (and how you plan to achieve them) for 2024 in the comments section.
News
This week, Jay was interviewed for Vogue discussing strategies for achieving your New Year’s Resolutions. Here is what he had to say:
“Don’t go it alone, is the key advice of Jay Van Bavel, a professor of psychology at NYU and author of Power of Us. “Anxiety and depression are on the rise, and we’re experiencing a loneliness epidemic,” he says. “America has always been the most individualistic society on earth and the pandemic and technology have put this truth on steroids.” A lack of community, or even a social calendar that is chockablock with commitments but devoid of longer periods of hang time, is directly connected to our modern ailments.
“A lot of people set resolutions that are like lose 10 pounds or get a gym membership, and most of them are done with their promises in a few weeks,” he says. Social connection, he promises, is the path to a better chance of success. He recommends joining a running group, finding a dependable gym buddy, or, if you’re a writer like him, signing up for a writers’ group. His group of five meets for lunch once a month and makes a point to share their goals for the next few weeks. “I’ll say I plan to outline the intro of this paper, or I’ll apply for that grant,” he says. “You have something to work toward because you know you’re being held to account. And you’re killing two birds with one stone since social connection is intrinsically rewarding.”
Catch up on the last one…
Need a new book, podcast, essay, or music rec? We share all our 2023 favorites in our last newsletter. If you’re looking for something new, check out our favorites!
