Resolve to Make Fewer Resolutions
Why when it comes to goals, the fewer you make the better your odds
Leo Babauta’s 6 Changes website recommends that we pick a half-dozen or fewer goals for 2010 and work on them one at a time (rather than starting them all at the stroke of midnight on January 1). You can resolve to quit smoking, lose weight, and save more money in one year; however, Babauta recommends doing each individually for a solid two months so that the habit has time to form.This sounds reasonable, but is there psychological research backing Babauta’s strategy?
The Science Behind Failed Resolutions
Blame It on the Brain, writes Jonah Lehr for the Wall Street Journal (hat tip: Marginal Revolution):
Willpower, like a bicep, can only exert itself so long before it gives out; it's an extremely limited mental resource.How limited is the will when it comes to multiple goals? Lehr mentions a pair of studies that found that relatively trivial cognitive strains caused participants to give in to temptation more readily. These tasks included such things as memorizing a 7-digit sequence of numbers or walking down a busy street. If such small cognitive loads have this effect, surely stacking multiple behavior-change goals will short-circuit the brain.
Given its limitations, New Year's resolutions are exactly the wrong way to change our behavior. It makes no sense to try to quit smoking and lose weight at the same time, or to clean the apartment and give up wine in the same month. Instead, we should respect the feebleness of self-control, and spread our resolutions out over the entire year. Human routines are stubborn things, which helps explain why 88% of all resolutions end in failure, according to a 2007 survey of over 3,000 people conducted by the British psychologist Richard Wiseman. Bad habits are hard to break—and they're impossible to break if we try to break them all at once.
. . .
The brain area largely responsible for willpower, the prefrontal cortex, is located just behind the forehead. While this bit of tissue has greatly expanded during human evolution, it probably hasn't expanded enough. That's because the prefrontal cortex has many other things to worry about besides New Year's resolutions. For instance, scientists have discovered that this chunk of cortex is also in charge of keeping us focused, handling short-term memory and solving abstract problems. Asking it to lose weight is often asking it to do one thing too many.
What about people who set and achieve many goals?
Do you know anyone who seems to set and achieve a large number of goals each year, or who cleaned up multiple areas of their life at once? In 2008, PsychCentral blogged about research that acknowledges such individuals. Does the evidence suggest that we should emulate their goal-promiscuity?
[Researchers Mukhopadhyay and Johar] found that people who believe that self-control is something dynamic, changing and unlimited (e.g., “I can stop smoking, all I have to do is put my mind to it. I can also change my eating and be a better person, it just takes willpower.”) tend to set more resolutions.This claim inserts a causal link into a correlation (if not into a spurious correlation). Those with high self-efficacy both set more goals and achieve more goals; this does not suggest that setting more goals raises self-efficacy and/or increases the odds of achievement. Self-efficacy itself (or being good at achieving goals) may be the cause of the large number of goals these individuals set; trying to reverse such a causal chain by setting too many goals may strain limited time and cognitive resources, leading to failure.
. . .
As the researchers summarized, individuals with high self-efficacy attribute failure to insufficient effort, while individuals with low self-efficacy attribute failure to deficient ability. Higher self-efficacy generally is correlated with a greater likelihood of achieving one’s goals.
The investigators also found that if you are made to believe that self-control is a fixed or limited resource that you can’t change, you will also set fewer goals and will give up on them sooner, regardless of your level of self-efficacy.
. . . [I]t also seems to help to set more goals, because you will be more likely to succeed at them if you do (people who set fewer goals seem to often go into the exercise with the self-fulfilling expectation of failing).
If you do set several goals or resolutions each year and succeed in most or all of them, keep doing what you are doing. If you struggle to hold resolutions longer than your New Year’s Day hangover, try taking them one at a time. You have nothing to lose; 100% success on one resolution is better than failing at five, three, or even two.
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Friday, January 1, 2010
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