The Benefit of New Year's Resolutions
Why and how to commit to bettering yourself this New Year.
New Year’s is a wonderful holiday because it provides a fresh start. It gives us the ability to put the past behind us and strive for a better future. A great way to do this is by committing yourself to New Year’s resolutions. While you can spontaneously commit yourself to changing for the better, it feels much more significant to change for a special occasion.
I think forming a resolution for the New Year is a way of hacking the brain’s desire for purity. Your brain likes the idea of a perfect year without any mistakes. It also likes the feeling of maintaining a really long streak. We’re saddened by someone who relapses after two days much less than someone who relapsed after two years despite the fact that both the people are in the same situation—back to whatever they shouldn’t be doing. The guy who relapsed after two years lost something more significant: the psychological power of a streak.
Commitments seem to be subject to the Lindy effect—the phenomenon in which the longer something has been around, the longer it will be around. Successful streaks reinforce their own significance as opposed to whittle down willpower. A streak is evidence of success. How hard can it be if you’ve already successfully done it so many times? If commitments are truly Lindy, then we would see a distribution with a large amount of derailments quickly with fewer and fewer commitments persisting as time increases. That seems to be how New year’s resolutions work out; lots of people screw up quickly. The gyms don’t stay packed for long.
The human brain adapts to its circumstances whatever they may be, preventing people from being persistently miserable. The start of the commitment involves a lot of willpower and motivation but as you make it farther, you find that it isn’t so bad. If your goal is running 5 miles twice a week, it will become not only physically easier but it will become mentally easier as well. It will become just something you do without thinking and your brain will cease to cause that anxiety. It may even be fun.
It must be easier said than done because people are rarely living their best life. Most people have some aspect of their life they want to improve—whether it be personal, career, financial or health. They will read a self-help book or listen to an inspirational speech and begin forming goals, but it does not work out because motivation fades. We need a way to get from planning to well established habit without derailing.
The first step is to think about what you really want and how bad you want it. Maybe you say that you want to be able to run a marathon, but take a moment and consider how many hours of running that would require. Is it something you really want all things considered? If it is, then good. When you’re tired and exhausted, you can remember that it is worth it. If you ever decide it isn’t worth it, you can reevaluate but you shouldn’t in the middle of a run. You’re not thinking clearly in that moment. You’re probably hyperbolic discounting — discounting the value of future time too much.
The next step is to avoid breaking the streak. When you break the streak, you lose your sense of gravity. It becomes so much harder to get back on track. The double edged sword is that now it is much easier to feel warranted to slack off. “I’m not on a streak, so I can indulge a little before I recommit.”
To avoid stepping off track, I think it is good to amplify the loss of a single misstep psychologically. One way of doing this is to increase the financial penalty for misstepping. You can do this with an application like Beeminder. The premise is that you set a daily, weekly or monthly goal and if you veer from that goal too much, you will be charged. The charges increase as you veer off course more and more. You may not want to pay the money, but if you really want to achieve your goals, this helps.
Another way is to increase the social cost. If you publicly announce your goals when you create them and when you fail, you may be less inclined to derail. Failing to successfully complete our goals makes us looks bad and incentivizes keeping on course.
For some of my goals, I would like to do increase the financial and social cost. You could too if you are serious about improving. You can comment below any goals you have and then commit to updating it to mention your failure if you do not succeed. I hope it helps! Happy New Year!
Some 2022 Goals:
Maintain my 500 page per week book reading habit. Success is achieved if the page count of completed books in 2022 is less than or equal to 500 per week. I use physical, digital and audiobook, but it has to be non-fiction. This goal is particularly ambitious but conceivable seeing as I have been doing it for a few weeks now. Audiobooks provide me with the ability to read significantly more than I would otherwise. I intend to replace a lot of podcast listening and music listening with audiobooks.
Average 10,000 steps per day. This goal is also pretty ambitious but very worthwhile. To maintain it, I will need to be pretty active which helps my mood I suspect.
Publish on substack at least once a week on average. I would like to publish twice a week but that may be way too difficult. This is a very good goal because I would like to monetize in the near future and demonstrating a consistent flow of content shows that I will be worth the money.
Begin doing interviews for the podcast. I think that this would be very helpful for the Parrhesia brand to start getting interesting people for interviews. It does involve some setup, communication and preparation.
Significantly cut down on internet use. I look at websites like YouTube and Twitter too much and I would like to stop. I’m going to start aggressively by blocking the most addictive websites using ScreenTime. Wish me luck!
I'm ratcheting down the 10K goal temporarily from 10K -> 8K. Hopefully, I move it back up to compensate when the weather gets better in order to finish the year out with an average of 10K.