It is once again the season for making resolutions. For those of us who make New Year’s resolutions, we know how hard it is to stick to them and achieve our goals. According to studies done by researchers from the University of Scranton, only 8 percent of people achieve their New Year’s goals. Meanwhile, the data collected by the social media Strava on users’ commitments to exercising shows that most people quit their New Year’s resolutions by January 12.
What science-based tricks can we use to increase the chances that we stick to our New Year’s resolutions and make this the year we will finally make the change for good?
In my previous essay, I argued that if you want to stick to your New Year’s resolution, you should no rely on self-control. Instead, you should change what you can in your environment, build new habits, and unlearn old ones.
Before we dive into the science of building habits, the point about self-control is worth summarizing here. Scientists have long use a standardized test to try to measure self-control. This test involves asking participants to rate their self-control. People’s score in this self-assessment is highly correlated with other measures of success in life.
However, a growing number of studies are beginning to reveal that people who rated themselves as having a lot of self-control rarely use self-control at all. Instead, the people who supposedly have strong willpower actually rarely experience temptations in the first place.
On the other hand, people who get tempted often report feeling drained. It seems that using willpower to reject temptation takes a lot of mental energy, which might be the reason why people who are surrounded by a lot of temptations are more likely to fail on their goals.
This is why most psychologists think that in order to stay true to our New Year’s resolutions, or to any commitments we are trying to make to ourselves, it is best to rely on the power of our environment and habit.
There is only so much we can do about our environment. For instance, we cannot replace our family and relatives, and they have a large influence over what temptations we are subjected to. Our friends, who can subject us to a lot of temptations, are not easy to replace either. The same can be said of our workplace environment, our neighborhood, and so on.
Furthermore, we are constantly bombarded by temptations over which we have little control, for example the ads we see on TV, on billboards, and online.
This is where the power of habit comes in. After all, according to a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, around 45 percent of our daily activities are habitual.
In his book The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg writes that habits have a three-part structure. First is the cue, an event in your internal or external environment that triggers an action. Second is the action, which is activity you want to build (or, in the case of bad habits, drop). Third is the reward, which is when your brain receives a reward for taking the desired activity.
What this means is that for a habit to stick, it must be paired with a regular event in your life. Furthermore, it must be coupled with some sort of reward. For example, if taking a bath is paired with brushing and flossing your teeth, the latter activities become automatically linked with the former.
Another trick scientists suggest is called “temptation bundling.” A leading proponent of this method is Katherine Milkman, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Temptation bundling is the technique of pairing a healthy activity, such as preparing healthy foods, with an indulgent activity such as watching your favorite TV series on Netflix.
In a paper published in Articles in Advance, Milkman and her co-authors Julia Minson of Harvard University and Kevin Volpp of the University of Pennsylvania write about the result of their “field experiment measuring the impact of bundling instantly gratifying but guilt-inducing ‘want’ experiences (enjoying page-turner audiobooks) with valuable ‘should’ behaviors providing delayed rewards (exercising).”
What they have found is that temptation bundling makes it more likely for participants to build the new healthy habit.
Once habits are built, they become automatic and can be hard to unlearn. This is because they change the brain’s circuitry, as was shown in a study done by scientists from the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences.
While powerful, habits are a double-edged sword, because bad ones can be hard to break. In extreme cases, the same pathways in the brain the create habits can lead to addictions and obsessive compulsions. This topic deserves its own article.
In summary, changing for the better requires the power of habits, whether it be building new ones or getting rid of old ones.