How to Make Resolutions That Might Actually Stick

Give specificity and reflection a try

A few years ago, I wrote a New Year’s post about the “fresh start effect,” a finding in psychology research that a sense of some new beginning (like a new year) helps people make behavioral changes.

After that post, economist and journalist Tim Harford, whose work I’ve long admired (he is the host of the wonderful “Cautionary Tales” podcast), wrote me a note, the essence of which was: I’m not so sure about that. Particularly, Tim noted that while research had found fresh starts useful in setting goals, it was less clear whether behavioral change was actually sustained. We both agreed to do a bit more reading, and have a discussion at some point in the future.

This year, with “Quitter’s Day” arriving tomorrow (apparently the second Friday in January, because supposedly many people will have ditched their resolutions by then), I invited Tim to chat about resolutions, and how to get better at keeping them. Below is our conversation, edited for length.

(And if you’re interested in resolutions and goal-setting generally, I’ll be part of a virtual conversation hosted by TED next week. You can RSVP and submit questions here. More details below the post.)

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Tim Harford: I've got a list of my goals for the next quarter on my wall, and my wife went through and, like: “No, that's a bad goal. That's a bad goal…” and her reasoning was: you should focus on process, not on outcomes. So if you want to improve your running time, you should have a goal to run a certain number of times, rather than a target time, which is not an absurd view. But I'm quite happy to have a target time actually.

David Epstein: When I was an 800-meter runner, for years I set time goals for each race. But late in my career I dropped that. I felt like, ya know, all this time goal does is, after I pass the finish line, lets me know if I should be happy or sad, and usually sad because I was setting stretch goals. It didn’t help me at all in the race. So I dispensed with that and instead started doing targeted experiments. Like: make a strong move with 300 meters to go. And that gave me something actionable to try and learn from. And this gets at something I wanted to discuss, because in preparing for this chat, I was perusing some recent research — some of which behavioral scientist Katy Milkman sent me — and some of it suggested that people do better in terms of behavior change when they set more granular goals — specific things they can do now, rather than big, vague, long-term goals.

TH: That's right. Does the goal or resolution help you make decisions about what to do? So for me, if I want to set a time goal for my 5k, I have one of these apps, and it will turn my time goal into a training program. So it's fine to have the goal, because the goal immediately is converted by an algorithm into: okay, on Tuesday, you need to do this; on Thursday, you need to do this, which is what I need. But the goal is still motivating…So the question is: is the goal just some kind of vague aspiration, or is there some way of knowing what I’m actually going to do with my morning. And if the goal helps you make that decision and motivates you, then it's a good goal. If it doesn't, if it just sort of induces a vague sense of guilt, then it's not a great goal.

DE: On that point, I wonder about New Year's resolutions. In reading of some of this research, it seemed to me that it was suggesting that New Year's resolutions in particular are often likely to be vague, or not specific enough to easily convert to action. So I wonder if that contributes to the many failed New Year’s resolutions, the fact that maybe it’s a time to make these big, vague stretch goals, and, like me with the 800, it doesn’t give a short-term action to try, but rather just a reason to be happy or sad in the distant future.

TH: I haven't seen that research, and I don't know if it's true, but it feels right. Resolutions are often very vague and kind of transformative — I'm going to be a different person in some way. And I don't think we should be surprised that somebody who resolves to improve themselves but doesn't actually have a plan for doing any of that day-to-day, it's probably not going to go very well.

DE: One of the papers that Katy Milkman sent me looked at people who had committed to do 200 hours of volunteer service over a year. And they were randomized into three groups that basically got different reminders: one group was repeatedly prompted just to do the 200 hours; another to do 8 hours every two weeks, and a third to do 4 hours every week. And the more granular strategies, the latter two, worked better. So some flexibility was sacrificed for granularity, but that seemed to help.

Another interesting point that popped up in some of the reading I was doing was the suggestion that approach goals are better than avoidance goals, meaning goals for doing something, rather than avoiding something. I wonder if that, too, is because the avoidance goals are more nebulous, like: “I’m going to stop eating poorly.”

TH: You can do both. You can say: instead of hanging out on social media, I'm going to read a book, and I'm going to carry a paperback around with me instead of my phone, and when I want something to read, that's what I'm going to read. So that’s an approach goal, but it's also an avoidance goal. Cal Newport suggests this in his book Digital Minimalism, that you don't just quit all your digital devices, you actually make a specific plan: Why did I want all this stuff anyway? Because I wanted something to read, or because I want to understand the news, or because I want to connect with my friends. Okay, great. Do all of that stuff without digital media. So I like the fact that it's you trying to remove a behavior, but you're also trying to replace it with something more constructive. You can imagine the same thing — instead of smoking, I'm going to eat a carrot. Instead of eating beef, I'm going to eat a carrot, whatever. There are other ways to do this, right?

DE: I love that… And now because I have a digressive brain I’m going to make a weird jump to something I was reminded of by your point about replacement goals. Last year I was researching Martin Luther King Jr.’s rhetorical techniques; I know, left turn —

TH: I’m quite interested myself. Go on…

DE: He uses a lot of concepts and analogies repeatedly, with slight variations, and one that comes up is Odysseus versus Orpheus. Odysseus lashed himself to the ship's mast to avoid giving in to the song of the sirens. Whereas Orpheus, in one myth, used his beautiful music to drown out the sirens' song instead of restraining himself. And in another myth, during his journey to the underworld to retrieve his love, he used his music to charm Hades. So King would talk about not aiming for the absence of hate, but rather working for the presence of love. And I think that's just a very interesting concept in general, of not just getting rid of a thing you don't like or restraining yourself, but replacing it with something or promoting something that's better or more attractive.

TH: Orpheus in the end, there's a limit of that. It didn’t work out for him…

DE: Haha, yeah I guess things ended up better for Odysseus in the end. Although nobody who was around Odysseus, all his shipmates died, so they both had their struggles. But I want to switch gears now, because one of the reasons that I was thinking about these issues is that I learned Friday is apparently “Quitter’s Day” — the second Friday in January because supposedly by then a lot of people have abandoned their New Year’s resolutions.

TH: That sounds like something some PR person made up, right?

DE: I have no idea, but I’m suspicious that that’s true of most things these days, so seems likely — the quitting industrial complex at it again. But when you and I were first discussing some of this, I had written a short New Year’s post on the “fresh start effect,” the idea that a sense of turning the page — whether a new year, or birthday, or whatever — makes people more likely to adopt some behavioral change. And some compelling work I recall about this was from Katy Milkman and her colleagues, when people were sent prompts to increase retirement saving, and the prompts worked better if the goal was to start after their next birthday. But as you pointed out, for a lot of work in this general area, the dependent variable was not what you really care about — sustained behavior change — but rather people were more likely to set a goal or sign up for something or something like that.

TH: That's absolutely true. I mean, with the case of retirement savings, it's great if you can get somebody to sign up for retirement savings, because: boom, you've done it, right? That’s done and inertia is incredibly powerful and they’re probably not going to stop. But for everything else — Are you going to quit smoking? Are you going to run regularly? — nobody has a problem starting this stuff, right? We're full of people who go to the gym for a week and then stop. So starting is not the problem. Persistence is the challenge, I think. And I admire Katy’s work, and I think she's doing great stuff, but it is much easier for an academic to measure something like: Did you sign up? Or did you show up for a week, or a month, rather than were you still doing this three years later. It's easier to measure starts than continuation. So that's why I have not been hugely impressed by the fresh start effect itself. Because who cares about starting, right? It’s continuing.

DE: The idea of a short or small intervention that has a huge impact is incredibly appealing, but one of my broad learnings from reading social science in general is that if you want a lasting effect, you usually need a lasting intervention. That said, given that I think the dosage of exercise that has some benefit is small, I still think going to the gym a little and then quitting is a win, especially I guess if they do that every year, which sounds kind of funny…

TH: If you have 100 people who start who wouldn't have started, and only five of them stick with it, well, you just had five people who now have an exercise habit who didn't. So that's a win. But still, you do kind of wonder about the other 95.

DE: Speaking of, [psychologist] Adam Alter told me about the “what the hell” effect, which is the idea that one might set a goal, say to budget carefully for a month, and then if they break it in some small way, they say “What the hell? It’s already broken, so I might as well go nuts.” And maybe you can actually end up worse than you started, because that’s out the window, and you might spend excessively. Or a few papers I read talked about the confidence hit when people fail with their resolutions. So I wonder if there are scenarios where you can actually end up worse off than you started.

TH: I have a kind of new angle on all this that I want to get your perspective on… I was thinking about, people like you and me, at the beginning of every year, we write about resolutions, and we think about how to make resolutions, and what kind of resolutions, and should there be goals, or should there be processes, or should you make one, or should you make ten. And all this stuff is totally valid. But here's another question: come February, when a lot of people have failed in their resolutions, what is the process of reflection? And it's my contention that people do not generally look at their list of resolutions in February and go: “Is this working or not?” And they do not necessarily iterate. I think some people do, but most don't. And I suspect the reason for that is pretty straightforward, which is that if you said you're going to quit smoking and you haven't quit smoking, you probably don't want to remind yourself of that. And if you do remind yourself of that, it's kind of obvious what the action is, right? Well, okay, try to quit again. But I think that actually if we did review the goals and go: okay, what worked, what didn’t? And think about, well, why didn’t it work; why didn’t I do that; what were the obstacles? We might actually make better resolutions next time. That links to my habit of making goals every three months, because you’ve got room to iterate….I think the process of reflecting on goals that we didn't succeed in is something that we probably don't do enough of. That's just my thought. I haven't seen many articles written in February about what to do about all the resolutions you didn't keep.

DE: I love that idea. When I was writing my first book, I ended up, for my own professional-improvement reasons, following up with one of the scientists who studied self-regulatory learning in soccer players, which is basically this loop of: find something to improve on; make a hypothesis for how you can do that; try it out; reflect on how it worked, adjust and repeat. Basically being a scientist of yourself, and there’s voluminous literature on it, but as she told me, the most important part boils down to a word: reflection. We don’t do it enough. Intuitively, we feel like we get everything from an experience just by going through it, but actually we leave a lot on the table if we don’t make time for explicit reflection. …Tim, since you’re going to write a piece on this, can you launch a new holiday — Reflecting on Your New Year’s Resolutions Day?

TH: I need to get whoever the PR person was who invented, what was it, Quitter’s Day? I think two weeks is too early, but March 1 feels like a better time to reflect.

DE: So a good New Year's resolution for everyone this year: reflect on your New Year's resolutions in early March. And I guess if you fail at that, we’ll have to have a holiday in June for reflecting on your failed reflection on your failed New Year’s resolutions!

TH: Yeah, well, it turns out: changing yourself is difficult!

Thanks to Tim, and I highly recommend his podcast, “Cautionary Tales.” And thanks to Katy Milkman for sharing papers.

If you’re interested in more on resolutions and goal-setting — next Tuesday, TED is hosting a virtual conversation on the topic between me and ex-NFL-player-turned-sports-analyst Emmanuel Acho. Last year, Emmanuel gave a TED Talk on why we should stop setting goals at all!

You can RSVP and submit questions here. Given that questions left in the Range Widely comments are frequently exceptional, I hope a few of you will consider submitting.

Lastly: there’s an episode out today of “Pablo Torre Finds Out” in which Pablo Torre and I discuss the science surrounding transgender athletes and athletes with differences of sex development. Some of it draws from chapter four of The Sports Gene (“Why Men Have Nipples”). You can listen to that here, or watch it here.

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Thanks for reading. Until next time…

David