I've Failed Every New Year's Resolution I Ever Made

And odds are good that you have, too. Here's some notes on the banality of failure.

Image by Author, via MidJourney

Today’s Entry

In 2007 Richard Wiseman and his lab at the University of Hertfordshire ran a massive experiment on… New Year’s resolutions! To my knowledge the results were never published in academia, but we do have a write-up of them on his website, Quirkology. I’ve linked to a cached version on the Wayback Machine—just click on the portrait. Or, alternately, you can click here.

Richard Wiseman — Portrait from: http://richardwiseman.wordpress.com

Let me give you the rundown:

Dr. Wiseman and his team followed 3,000 people who made New Year’s resolutions in January of 2007. Participants were divided into groups, and groups were given different sets of supplemental instructions. One group, for example, was given instructions to set goals. Another was given instructions to tell their friends and family so that they could receive support and accountability. At the start, people were asked about how confident they were in their ability to succeed.

And then? Wiseman and his team kept track of the dropout rate.

Several good things came from this study. One big finding was that men and women benefit from different strategies: Men benefited more from goal-setting, while women benefited more from sharing their goals with other people. Dr. Wiseman speculated about this and I particularly enjoyed his conclusions regarding men—he suggested that, left to their own devices, men pick unrealistic resolutions. Goal-setting helps men, then, because it forces them to think the through the process of achieving their resolution rather than surging after foolish dreams like lemmings charging boldly into the ocean at high tide.

But the biggest finding, for me, is this: In January, 52% of participants were confident in their chances of success. In December, though? Only 12% of the participants were successful.

I’ve known about this study for a while. It is going to work its way into my next Psychology of Writing article. But, for now, I just want to get some thoughts out there, because I think they might be useful to you. I’m going to format each as an independent section. You can treat the rest of this article as a classic listicle: Just pick the sections that sound interesting to you and go.

Image by author, via MidJourney

Where did all of this insanity start?

First thought? New Year’s resolutions are actually insane.

The classic saying, attributed to Albert Einstein, is that insanity is doing the same thing again and agin, and expecting different results. The provenance of the saying is false¹ but I can’t think of a better quote to encapsulate just how maddening New Year’s resolutions are. I eventually gave up on them because each resolution was a guaranteed way to start my year on a bad note.

Something about the resolutions themselves invites internal rebellion. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed this, but I’ve tried to quit enough bad habits to know that there is a psychological kickback when you purpose to do something. Say, for example, that I want to lose weight—one of the most destructive things I can do towards that end is to resolve to eat less; whenever I do, the idiot circuits in my brain all come online at once and I do stupid things like grazing rampantly on carbohydrates “because I’m going to quit soon.” And yet… this is our default strategy!

I don’t know where this all started; but I do know that it is at least 100 years old, dating back to the work of William James and, preceding him, Alexander Bain. I’m going to refer to it as the James-Bain model of habit change. Here’s a description from James’ Principles of Psychology:

Two great maxims emerge from [Bain’s] treatment. The first is that in the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving off of an old one, we must take care to launch ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible. Accumulate all the possible circumstances which shall re-enforce the right motives; put yourself assiduously in conditions that encourage the new way; make engagements incompatible with the old; take a public pledge, if the case allows; in short, envelop your resolution with every aid you know. This will give your new beginning such a momentum that the temptation to break down will not occur as soon as it otherwise might; and every day during which a breakdown is postponed adds to the chances of its not occurring at all.

The second maxim is: Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again. Continuity of training is the great means of making the nervous system act infallibly right.

William James - Principles of Psychology

I hate this advice. I think it is outdated and disastrous. I’ll address the problems with it at length someday, but for now I just want to note that James’ work on habits was written in 1890. And yet… it sounds like the standard approach to New Year’s resolutions that we use today: Get a strong start and try to outrun your own exhaustion, hoping your habit will become automatic before your willpower dies.

That sounds… a little ridiculous, doesn’t it? And yet our current approach, not only to New Year’s resolutions, but to most major life changes, is almost identical to what it was over 130 years ago. And to complete that thought, recall that in Wiseman’s study three thousand hopefuls all made New Year’s resolutions. Less than one in eight made it through to the end.

Can you think of any other area of life where people would tolerate advice with an 88% failure rate for 135 years, and still keep going back to the same bad strategy?

Image by author, via MidJourney

The weakness of self-help advice

You may have picked up on this by now but I’m bear-ish on conventional wisdom about life change. For years of my life I was obsessed with a particular question. It’s counterintuitive, but I think it encapsulates modern self-help advice quite nicely:

How do I start an endeavor in such a way that I can be certain I will finish it?

That’s the big question of life change, no? How can I begin a diet in such a way that I can know for sure that in two years I will be fifty pounds lighter than I am now?

I think many of you will recognize that there is something fundamentally wrong with this question, and I agree. Making real, lasting changes in life involves re-framing your life so that, with every action, in every moment, you are answering a different question than the one above.

But if you consdier the James-Bain model we discussed earlier, my hope is that you’ll recognize that it is exactly that type of thinking. Whenever anyone follows the “start strong, run fast” approach to habit change, they are all tacitly asking the question; how do I start in such a way that I know I will finish? They ask that question implicitly, with their actions, even though they never state it in plain language—which is tragic because if they did they might start to sense how wrong it was, and perhaps try to find a different answer.

Modern psychology isn’t helpful in this regard. Many (if not most) of their studies start with the James-Bain paradigm, and are shackled to it as a result. Consider Wiseman again:

Only 12% of Wiseman’s participants achieved their resolution. But remember, Wiseman also tested strategies for boosting success. And at first blush it looks like he reported promising results. So, what do those results actually look like, in terms of their success rate?

Well, he mentioned that for men, setting goals boosted their success rate by… 22%.

And for women, reporting their resolution to friends and family boosted their success rate by… 10%.

There are two ways to read these percentages. Since our base-rate for success is 12%, one possibility is that the numbers Wiseman reported are expressed as percentages of the whole, which would imply that setting goals boosted men’s success rate from 12% to 34%, and sharing resolutions boosted women’s success rate from 12% to 22%.

The other possibility is that the numbers Wiseman reported are expressed as percentages of the success group, in which case it would mean that men’s success rate jumped from 12% to 14.64% (or, 12% x 1.22) and women’s success rate jumped from 12% to 13.2% (or, 12% * 1.10).

I’m not sure which of these is the correct interpretation. I suspect it is the second, but since I haven’t been able to find more written about the New Year’s study I have reached out to Dr. Wiseman to see if he might be able to clarify.

But it’s worth noting that even in the best case scenario, if you maximize your odds using the best strategy for your gender, the odds still range from 2-to-1, to 4-to-1, against you.

That, in a nutshell, is the problem that I am getting at; when you are dealing with low chances of success, doubling or even tripling your odds sounds impressive, but it still doesn’t leave you in a good position. And that’s the problem with most self-help advice; our basic paradigm for making large, meaningful life changes is so bad that even the most successful strategies we have to boost our odds of success are still just permutations on a failed paradigm.

What I would like to see, more than anything, is a way of thinking about life change that shatters the old James-Bain paradigm entirely.

Image by Author, via MidJourney

You are not alone

I’m going to end this with a short note. Back when I was in graduate school I struggled with procrastination.

Well.. no. That’s a polite way of putting it. Let me just be candid. My second year of graduate school I took on a project that was too large for me. I had an ambitious idea for an article on charismatic leadership, which would combine two theoretical angles on the topic—my own, and my advisor’s—into a framework explaining why some leaders are just so damn magnetic.

Blah blah. I could talk a lot about that project, but the important part for us, right now, is that I bit off more than I could chew. And I procrastinated. Badly. I put off writing a ten-thousand word academic journal article until a couple weeks before it was due.

Normally I have a frighteningly accurate “task estimator” in my head that helps me predict how much work a project will take. I might avoid a project for weeks, but when I hit the danger zone marked by my internal estimator, something in my psyche shifts and I explode in a flurry of focused activity. So I rarely procrastinate too much.

This time, though, the estimator didn’t work correctly. It was my first time writing an academic article and my anxiety had reached a peak. I was so crippled by anxiety that every time I looked at my screen I just hyperventilated and squirmed and then retreated to my kitchen, or to Starbucks.

To get over this I leaned on a tried and true strategy. I knew from experience that there was a point, late at night, where anxious avoidant part of my brain would calm down enough that I could stop procrastinating, allowing me to write. So I decided that, each day, I would stay up until I had written something.

My pattern, then, was: wake up, eat breakfast, spend thirteen hours vacillating back and forth between my computer and anywhere else, write for two or three hours, then collapse and go to sleep.

The problem was that it stopped working after two days. Suddenly…. I had to stay up later to make it work. And later. And later.

By the second week I was staying up for 36 hours straight before I hit the phase where my brain allowed me to write. I would wake up, spend two days trying to write my paper, without sleeping, write for three or four hours when my brain finally allowed me to, and then I would go to sleep for eight to ten hours, wake, and repeat the process.

I failed. My first draft was rough, and that’s stating it charitably. My advisor had to call in an extension and we spent an extra week and a half revising it so that it was worthy of submission. Since I was still doing most of the writing, and my problem with procrastination had not gone away, I had to keep up my two-day shifts for an extra week.

It’s been eight years since then and my circadian rhythm is still messed up because of it. I have a delayed sleep-phase disorder now; I go to sleep later and later each night and have to use a chronotherapy technique once or twice per year to reset my sleep schedule so that it aligns with normal people’s.

Image by Author, via MidJourney

So… where was I? Ah. Yes. Back when I was in graduate school I struggled with procrastination. But one things that made it far worse for me was the constant, creeping sense of shame. I felt like a freak, a lone failure in a sea of people who had it together. So I would go to incredible lengths to avoid failing.

After the incident with that first paper (which did get published), I realized that I needed to change. And also, after that episode, I got really interested in procrastination—so I wound up doing my dissertation on it. As part of my dissertation I collected data from a class of 150 students that allowed me to track their writing progress on their term papers. To my knowledge the dataset I collected is the first one that actually allows an answer to the question “How much of a term paper does a class put off until the last day?”

The answer to that is that the class, as a whole, does about 68% of their work in the 24 hours before a deadline.

And when I learned that… I relaxed. And I forgave myself. Because suddenly I realized that I wasn’t a lone freak; my tendency to procrastinate was more extreme, but I wasn’t struggling alone. Panic-writing a term paper on the last day was the most common outcome for students in my study. Those who completed their work early were rare, by comparison.

That story is the long way around to what I hoped to say to you, but I hope it gives you some context.

What I hope you take away from Wiseman’s study is that… you are not alone. Did you fail your New Year’s resolution this year? Approximately 88% of the people that you know failed theirs, too.

If you are one of those driven but frustrated people who wants to succeed at your resolutions, you’re also not alone—I’m right there with you, along with many other ambitious, driven, blessedly insane people, all of whom are trying to fight their way to success. I hear you. I get you. I support you.

But I hope that Dr. Wiseman’s statistics give you pause for a moment. They suggest that failure is the most common experience for people who try to do a big thing. In other words, you are not alone. You are not strange. You are not broken.

Rather, you are normal. And if you keep on fighting to follow through on your endeavors? One day, you will get it; and on that day, rather than achieving normalcy, you will have done something exceptional.

For me, that understanding reframed the entire fight. I hope that it does the same for you.

Namaste, yo. You’ve got my support.

James

Image by Author, via MidJourney

Footnotes

1. It wasn’t Einstein who actually said it. Did you really trust the internet to accurately tell you the source of an inspirational quote? C’mon. Name-dropping a comforting historical figure is part of the genre; powerquotes are the internet writ large, where truth is subordinate to clicks.