The psychology of new year's resolutions

12/29/2022

New year’s resolutions

It’s that time of the year again. You are probably busy figuring out your new year’s resolutions for next year and you are likely feeling excited about them and thinking that “this year, I will stick to my resolutions”. Your resolutions for the past year are have become an afterthought. A recent study showed that about two-thirds of people abandon their new year’s resolutions after a month. How can we improve that number? How can we improve the success rate of our new year’s resolutions? In this post, we try to answer those questions by looking at the psychology behind new year’s resolutions.

Why do we even set new year’s resolutions?

The new year serves as a natural break point and a cyclical marker of time in which we are allowed a clean slate and can sketch out our reinvention. Back when physical calendars were still a thing (I know they still exist, but not for me), the new year meant a brand new and empty calendar, which is a great metaphor for the psychology of the new year. The new year is a story still to be written, and the possibilities are in theory endless. But it’s all just a mental construct of course.

Why do new year’s resolutions fail?

Do you find yourself setting the same goals every year, but still end up abandoning them in mid-February? Then it might be time to rethink or restate your goals. Many goals fail because they’re too abstract and lack concrete actions that you can take to achieve that goal. Personally, I believe that a resolution is much easier to keep if it’s in the form of an action rather than a goal. Let’s say that your goal is to lose weight. Then your new year’s resolution should not be “I’m going to lose weight”. It should be something more in line with “I’m going to work out twice a week and only eat sugar on Saturdays”. I think it’s much easier and more motivating to formulate my resolutions as actions that I can perform that work towards a larger goal.

Your new year’s resolutions should be SMART

The term “SMART goals” is often used in business contexts and it’s a method for ensuring that your goals are stated in a way that will make them more attainable. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. Let’s look at each of these adjectives in the context of the resolution “I’m going to get 1000 subscribers on Youtube”.

Specific

For a goal to be specific, it should state:

What’s to be accomplished? I think we can put a checkmark on this one.
Who’s responsible? Well since it’s your new year’s resolution, this one goes without saying. You are responsible.
What steps need to be taken to achieve the goal? This is where we go wrong. We have not formulated any actions that will take us closer to our goal. We could rewrite the goal as “I want to get 1000 subscribers on Youtube by posting two videos a week for a year”.

Measurable

A goal is measurable when it’s put in such a way that you’ll know when you’ve achieved it. Let’s look at two examples: “I’m going to get more subscribers on Youtube” versus “I’m going to get 1000 subscribers on Youtube”. It’s hard to know when you’ve achieved the first one. Is it when you have gotten one more subscriber? Well, technically yes, but it’s probably not what you’re aiming for. Quantifying a goal will let you track your progress toward it and can add more motivation when you’re going through a rough time.

Achievable

Setting achievable goals is all about being realistic. Let’s yet again reason about the previous example: “I’m going to get 1000 subscribers on Youtube”. As I’m writing this, I currently sit at 10 subscribers on my gaming channel. Is it realistic for me to reach 1000 subscribers by the end of 2023? It might not happen, but I think that it’s plausible. It would be different if my goal were to get one million subscribers in one year.

Relevant

This one speaks for itself, but it’s important to set goals that are relevant and in line with the intended trajectory of your personal development. For example, I have no interest in learning to play golf right now, so it would be weird if one of my resolutions was to go to the driving range once a week.

Time-bound

A new year’s resolution has a natural timebox of one year, but feel free to shorten that. You could have different resolutions that are time-boxed to different parts of the year. You might for example want to run a mile a day in the summer months and go cross-country skiing once a week in the winter months. Or you might want to have a sugar-free month in January. Whatever your resolutions might be, a shorter timebox will in most cases lead to a higher success rate.

Doing versus avoiding

Research shows that it’s easier to stick to your goals if they’re formulated as something that you should do rather than something you should avoid doing. Let’s use the example of losing weight again. Instead of formulating your goal as “I’m going to avoid sugar” you could formulate your goal as “I’m going to eat more protein and healthy fats and work out twice a week”. It’s not at all certain that this will lead to you avoiding sugar, but it’s more actionable, and completing this action will increase the chances of you avoiding sugar.

The power of the streak

We all know that feeling. We have done something beneficial to us for many consecutive days, weeks, or even months. We don’t want to break the streak that we have worked so hard to build. An everyday task has been turned into a game of sorts, and we want to continue winning. Keeping the streak alive can be a powerful motivator. But what happens when we break the streak? Speaking from my own experience, breaking a streak will have an enormous backlash on my motivation. I lose every ounce of motivation when the streak is broken. To remedy this, I allow myself to have one day when I don’t complete the task. However, to keep my streak alive, I can’t miss two days in a row. This is a powerful mental model that allows for slip-ups while minimizing the backlash. Another important factor for keeping the streak alive is the size of the task itself. The task at hand should be so small that there should be very little effort involved in completing it every day. Read more about small habits in the fantastic book Atomic Habits (affiliate link).

My new year’s resolutions for 2023

While on the subject of new year’s resolutions, I wanted to take the opportunity to share my resolutions for 2023:

Do one month of carnivore (January)
Post two videos a week on Youtube for the whole year
Publish one blog post a week for the whole year
Get 10 000 steps a day for the whole year
Work out at the gym twice a week for the whole year
Do cardio once a week for the whole year

Each of these resolutions is connected to my larger goal of becoming more productive and becoming a content creator rather than a content consumer.