On new year’s day, I awoke to a gray dawn. A gray that continued well into the afternoon, a gray that seemed portentous of the future of the coming year, given the global economic morass. A gray, I hope, not of the coming presidency.
A few days back, on NPR’s Science Friday, Ira Flatow interviewed a clinical psychologist, Dr. John Norcross about the nature of new year resolutions. I was astonished by Dr. Norcross’s statement that between 40 and 46 percent of those who make resolutions, succeed in keeping their resolution beyond six months. I had expected a far smaller number. Sure enough, a brief search revealed a December 2007 article in the British paper, The Telegraph, that another professor, a Dr. Richard Wiseman found that only 12 percent of the people were successful in keeping their resolution. Dr. Wiseman tracked about 3000 people who participated via the Internet – some 60 percent in the UK and the rest in the US – for around a year to arrive at his conclusion. Are the British worse off than their American counterparts in keeping resolutions ? Further search revealed a study published by Dr. Norcross in which when success was measured over a longer period, 2 years, the success rate to be only 19 percent. Dr. Wiseman’s experiment, by the way, is still open and you can join here.
I was struck by one of Dr. Wiseman advice’s: women and men must pursue different strategies, if they’re to be successful in their resolutions. He said that women were more likely to succeed when they revealed their resolutions to their social circle and were encouraged to not give up in the face of minor setbacks; men were more likely to succeed when their goals were simple and specific, rather than vague. His observation was that men are unrealistic about their expectations and so benefit from setting simple, specific goals. His mantra for succeeding in setting goals were:
- Make only one resolution
- Plan the resolution ahead of time. Don’t wait till the new year’s eve to come up with a goal.
- Make new resolutions, don’t repeat previous resolutions as this will set you up for frustration
- Men, be specific about your goals and keep them simple. Women, tell others about your resolution.
- Make the goal personal such as being attractive to women rather than just losing weight.
What about Dr. Norcross ? What words of wisdom did he have for those who made new year resolutions ? He recommends the same set as the one Dr. Wiseman, except that he doesn’t provide any gender-specific advice. He advices publicizing your goal, keeping it simple and specific to everyone, not just a specific gender. He also recommends to not let a slip get in the way of keeping at the resolution. He quotes a study that observed that 71 percent of successful resolvers said that they felt even stronger about pursuing their goal after their first stumble. Finally, he recommends changing environments to break old habits, to not go to the bakery if you want to avoid eating sweets. Another fascinating statistic that he provides is that of those who tried to change but didn’t make a resolution, only 4 percent were successful at the end of six months. So, the chance of success increases tenfold if one makes a resolution compared to not making one!
In an article published back in 1992, in the American Psychologist, Dr. Norcross, suggests that there are five stages to making a change (what’s with this preoccupation with five in the psychology community ? five stages of change, five stages of grief ?): pre-contemplation, contemplation, preparation, action and maintenance. Dr. Norcross suggests that those who make a resolution and make it public are well into the fourth stage of making a change and hence have a better chance of making a change compared to those who didn’t make a resolution. I suspect that for this to be true, people who make resolutions must be those who had them ready well before new year’s eve.
The brain physically changes when we learn new habits. The neurons in the prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia, two main actors in the learning process, show visible changes as new habits are acquired. The changes are so permanent, at least in the basal ganglia, that once acquired, they cannot be forgotten. They can lay dormant for a while, but when the right cues are provided, the old, long forgotten neuronal patterns fire again, and the prodigal son returns. Dr. Ann Graybiel and her team at MIT discovered this back in 2005. They also found that it was not possible to reverse the process i.e. to unlearn. The right cues caused the neurons that had changed in response to the learning to fire again. This explains why habits are so hard to break, why it is important to not recreate situations that cause the old habit to trigger again, to not go to the bakery if you to curb that sweet tooth.
The brain has two ways of processing inputs: a slow, conscious way and a fast, automatic way. As anyone who’s learnt a skill such as roller blading or downhill skiing knows, the initial motions are forced, slow and jerky while once the skill has been learned, the motion is smooth, fluid and automatic. Habit forming is slow, requires constant reinforcement in the form of rewards and constant attention. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for executive control, inhibiting a thought from conversion to action. But this requires self control or will power. An article published in April 2008 in the New York Times, says that willpower is like a muscle: there is only so much it can do before it fatigues. From the article:
The brain’s store of willpower is depleted when people control their thoughts, feelings or impulses, or when they modify their behavior in pursuit of goals. Psychologist Roy Baumeister and others have found that people who successfully accomplish one task requiring self-control are less persistent on a second, seemingly unrelated task.
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For example, if you do not want to drink too much at a party, then on the way to the festivities, you should not deplete your willpower by window shopping for items you cannot afford. Taking an alternative route to avoid passing the store would be a better strategy.
This is one reason why new habits are so hard to form and why it is essential to keep the resolutions simple, specific and single. The good news of the same study, however, is that like muscles, willpower can be built up through exercise. A study speculates that even an exercise such as brushing your teeth with your other hand for two weeks can improve your willpower. And once willpower improves, it can be used to deal with more curbing other bad habits. The NYT article states that people who stuck to an exercise regimen for two months also reported reducing impulsive spending, alcohol and junk food consumption and smoking. While the reason for the increase in willpower with practice is not well understood, the article speculates:
Perhaps neurons in the frontal cortex, which is responsible for planning behavior, or in the anterior cingulate cortex, which is associated with cognitive control, use blood sugar more efficiently after repeated challenges. Or maybe one of the chemical messengers that neurons use to communicate with one another is produced in larger quantities after it has been used up repeatedly, thereby improving the brain’s willpower capacity.
I cannot remember if I ever practiced making new year’s resolutions. The Dalai Lama once said, “There is no world peace without inner peace”. Inner peace continues to be my every year’s resolution, every day’s resolution. I, for one, wish inner peace to all peoples in the coming year.
