Paradoxically, the dawn of a new year is often accompanied by sorrow. Not immediately of course, it usually takes a few weeks to kick in. It arrives just around the time our new year’s resolutions are in tatters, when empty cigarette packets and candy-bar wrappers are staring up at us; guilty reminders of our ill-discipline and imperfectability.
The pollsters suggest that around 40 per cent of us make new year’s resolutions – lose weight, get fit, quit smoking – but only an elite minority achieves anything approaching lasting change. Almost comically, around a quarter of us fail in the first week. That’s right, for many of us it’s all over by January 7. Fast forward a month and more than half of us have fallen, and one year later maybe only 10 per cent remain resolute.
Weight loss, of course, is the number-one resolution, and gyms see a boom in new customers in January – increasingly, so too do the UAE's cosmetic surgeons. This is the month of "Janorexia"; the month of rapid weight loss and equally rapid weight gain, where crash diets crash, giving rise to waistline devastating rebound effects. But better to have tried and failed, than never tried at all, right?
Perhaps not, is the answer given by Dr Janet Polivy, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. Dr Polivy argues that the experience of failing to keep a diet or resolution makes subsequent failures more likely. This is a particularly vicious cycle, a negative feedback loop, where current failure feeds self-fulfilling expectations of future failure, and so on, infinitely. Every broken resolution makes subsequent breakages more likely.
In recent years, psychologists have become increasingly interested in new year’s resolutions in the broader context of self-initiated behaviour change. January 1 is like one huge natural experiment, with literally tens of millions of participants simultaneously committing to self-initiated behaviour change. This provides a great opportunity to examine which factors separate those who make it, from those who break it – their resolution that is.
The research to date suggests that there are no gender or age differences; men and women, young and old, we are all equally bad at sticking to resolutions. Those who do make it, however, appear to differ in important ways with regard to the strategies they adopt.
In a year-long study of more than 3,000 resolution-makers, Prof Richard Wiseman, the UK’s first (and only) professor for the public understanding of psychology, reports that men who were more successful in terms of keeping resolutions, tended to set better (or smarter) goals. Rather than set vague goals – “get fit” – or unrealistic ones – exercise for three hours per day, everyday – the men who kept resolutions tended to set very specific achievable goals, such as attend the gym twice a week. Basically, they set a lower bar, avoiding the machismo of unrealistic expectations. The beauty of the lower bar, is that it’s easier to avoid the resolve-sapping failure cycle mentioned above. Also, a low bar can always be raised incrementally.
In the same study, the women who were most successful at keeping resolutions tended to be those who went public with their goals, discussing them with friends and family. The idea here is that going public earns resolve-strengthening social support and encouragement. In addition to going public, those women who were better at dealing with minor setbacks, those less susceptible to the “what-the-hell effect”, also did much better.
This pleasantly jargon-free phenomenon, officially known as the what-the-hell effect, was coined by Dr Polivy after observing that some dieters tended to respond to minor setbacks in pretty dysfunctional ways. For example, eating one slice of cake – a minor slip – might lead to a “what-the-hell moment”, where the person reasons, “I broke my diet, I might as well eat the whole cake and the ice cream too, and restart my diet tomorrow”. Those better able to deal with minor setbacks are also better able to go the distance in terms of ultimately achieving their new year’s resolutions.
Of course, the easiest way not to break a resolution is not to make any. But this is also the surest way not to achieve any life-improving behavioural change at all.
Justin Thomas is an associate professor of psychology at Zayed University and author of Psychological Well-Being in the Gulf States
On Twitter: @DrJustinThomas
