The new year is almost here. You might refresh your home with a new look, buy new clothes, or plan parties for the new year celebration. But have you thought about improving yourself? We all have at least one new year resolution or a goal to achieve in the upcoming year.
I love the feeling of starting fresh with a new year. Even if it’s just one night that marks the change of a year, it offers a chance to improve. Now is a great time to evaluate your current situation, your past experiences, and your desired future state. New Year’s resolutions are goals, and motivation psychology shows that goals alone don’t work well. Goals need to be specific statements, preferably formulated in an if-then format: which action trigger should lead to which specific action.
A simple search of Psychology Today shows dozens of posts about New Year’s resolutions. Some of them will tell you that resolutions don’t work, and give you several reasons, while others will offer you useful advice on how to make them work, while admitting that it will be hard. The psychology behind this pessimistic view is not hard to understand. New Year’s resolutions are essentially statements of desirable objectives that you want to achieve. But, as hundreds of publications in psychology show, goals don’t work very well. In fact, many, if not most, goals are never actually implemented. And why should they be?
Goals come from the more rational, long-term-oriented part of your brain. Say you want to lose some weight, or be nicer to people, or reduce your social media use. You don’t have trouble seeing why you want to change. The problem is the more impulsive, short-term-oriented part of your brain, the one that maintains your habits and controls most of your daily actions. Your brain is very good at automating behaviour, saving resources for other things. But, when those automatic behaviours conflict with your long-term goals, you struggle. When you state a New Year’s resolution, or any long-term goal, you are talking to the wrong part of your brain. And using the wrong language.
“I want to lose weight” and “I want to be nicer to other people” are not written in terms of your habits and impulses. You will state those goals, and the next day you will grab a muffin and snap at your spouse. Should you just give up on New Year’s resolutions as hopeless? Of course not. Being aware of your goals is the start of change, and any opportunity that motivates you to make them explicit is a chance, be it the New Year, the Summer, or the first day of the rest of your life!
Leo Nayanamini Wijayasantha
