Thinking of making New Year’s resolutions? The trick isn’t trying harder, it’s planning smarter
For many, making New Year’s resolutions is a way to chart a path toward new behaviors or away from old ones. Jan. 1 offers the promise of making changes to improve health and happiness.
But setting goals and achieving them is hard.
“Making a specific plan can actually free up mental energy to accomplish goals,” said E.J. Masicampo, professor of psychology at Wake Forest University and an expert on goal-setting and self-regulation.
Masicampo said he has “long been fascinated by the profound influence of goals on people’s thoughts and attention.” He is the co-author of several studies, including Consider it done! Plan-making can eliminate the cognitive effects of unfulfilled goals, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Masicampo shared guidance on how to turn New Year’s resolutions into lasting behavioral changes.
What is the key to setting New Year’s resolutions we will keep?
A lot of goals are stated in generic intentions. Goals are much more attainable and we’re much more likely to succeed in our goals if we set specific plans for them. For example, we might decide we want to exercise more. “I will go to the gym after work every Tuesday and Thursday” is far more specific and far more likely to lead to success.
A plan answers these questions: When will I do it? How will I do it? In what context will I ensure it gets done? Setting specific plans for a goal is very useful because it helps us know exactly what to do and when. In self-regulation, a lot of what we’re responding to is the environment. A lot of our behaviors are driven by what’s happening around us. We respond to people and situations as they arise.
You also need to enjoy the goal and/or find it important. You’re much more likely to actually do the things you’re intending to do if you really want to do them. And the way we want to do something is by reminding ourselves why it’s important to us or rewarding or enjoyable. Set a goal that you are confident you can achieve.
Why do so many people make New Year’s resolutions?
The brain really is set up to be goal-focused. We are very goal-driven creatures, and when we’re focused on a goal, we are quite invested in it. New Year’s resolutions are so compelling because it’s the start of a new year. We’re very sensitive to new beginnings. This happens at the beginning of the week, the beginning of the month, when we move to a new place – it feels like a reset and it feels like we’re wiping the slate clean and can experience success maybe we haven’t before.
What gets in the way of achieving them?
I have found that goals often conflict and they compete. There’s a study showing that people have, on average, about 15 ongoing goals that they’re pursuing at any given moment. That is too many. One effective way to attain goals is to avoid distractions. That means setting up environments where we’re able to focus on one goal without being reminded of or distracted by the many other goals we have.
It is easy to have all-or-nothing thinking about goals. Appreciate that any progress is good progress. It’s really important to give ourselves grace around how hard it is to do so much at any time. I do think it is a useful strategy to recognize which goals we can release.
Social media is also a challenge for goals. It can make us less able to set reasonable standards for ourselves. It’s so easy to compare yourself to people on social media. They might inspire us to set standards for ourselves that are unreasonably high. It’s essential to set standards that make sense for you. You are the best benchmark, and you need to be thoughtful about what you might reasonably achieve and what might be fulfilling for you.
How can we turn goals into new habits?
Some psychologists suggest that about 99.8% of what we’re doing is very automatic and driven by the environment. So when we set a specific plan, in a way, we’re sort of cheating and hot-wiring our automatic system to create a new habit. One quick way to create a healthy habit is through repetition. That means pursuing your goal at the same time or in the same place or with the same people. And when you do that over days and weeks, the more you do it, the easier it becomes, the more habitual it becomes. When you set a specific “if, then” plan, you’re taking a lot of the work out, so the goal becomes more effortless. In advance, you’re deciding what situations are going to be appropriate and deciding when that situation arises, exactly what you’re going to do. That allows your behavior to be both effortless and far more efficient.
How do you research this?
My research focuses on self-control and goal-setting. It looks at how we change our behavior, how we get ourselves to do difficult things – like doing hard work or resisting temptations – and how we manage our multiple, sometimes competing goals. In short, “how do we become the people we want to be?” In my lab we’ve studied self-regulation goals in a lot of different ways. Often in our studies, we’re tracking people’s goals across time and in their everyday lives.
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