By Jeremy Dean, Speakeasy
“Those who cannot remember the past are
condemned to repeat it”.
This well-known quote, from philosopher George Santayana, wasn’t about New Year’s Resolutions, but it might well have been.
There’s a familiar feeling that accompanies those promises we make to ourselves around New Year. It’s déjà vu. Didn’t I make those self-same promises to myself last year? And maybe even the year before?
Perhaps some of the participants in a 1985 University of Scranton study on New Year’s resolutions had that sense of déjà vu. The same as any other year, they made promises to themselves about how they would change in 1986. The difference was that that year they confessed their resolutions to psychological researchers and were tracked over the coming months.
The results of the study do not make pretty reading. Sixty percent of people had given up after six months and who knows how many of the remaining 40 percent secretly gave up but didn’t want to admit it.
One of the main reasons New Year’s resolutions are so hard to change is that we come up against rock hard habits. Typical targets for resolutions like healthy eating, quitting smoking and taking up exercise are very difficult habits to alter because these patterns of behaviour have been built up over many years.
It’s natural, though, to assume that we should consciously be able to make changes to even long-established patterns. Unfortunately this neglects an important fact about how habits work.
This is the fact that our habits live mainly in the unconscious part of our minds. It’s like when you put on your seatbelt or look both ways before crossing the road: these things are done automatically, without being consciously willed. This is fine for habits that keep us safe from harm, but more irritating when we are trying to change a bad habit.
So, one of the keys to changing a rock hard habit is to identify what cues in the environment are setting it off. For example, is overuse of the internet set off by feeling low? Or perhaps stuffing down muffins is cued by being in a favourite coffee shop.
Once the habit’s trigger has been identified, it’s possible to make a change. But one of the classic mistakes people make is trying to suppress the habit. Research has shown that this tends to backfire, making the habit, and its unconscious performance, come back even stronger.
Instead it’s much better to try and replace the bad habit with a better one. Rather than suppressing a snacking habit, for example, it’s better to make the snack food healthier: switch from candy to apples.
Even with this change in mind, though, it’s easy to slip up and fall back on old habits. That’s why psychologists have developed and tested a series of techniques that can help. The first is all about making the right kind of plan. This involves linking a specific situation with a specific action.
You say to yourself something like: “If I’m hungry between meals then I will eat an apple.” Each time you successfully repeat the new response in the same situation, your replacement habit gains in strength.
The two habits, old and new, are bound to compete for a while, but other techniques can help keep you on the straight and narrow. One of the simplest ways of boosting motivation is to accentuate all the negative aspects of your old habit and all the positive aspects of your new habit.
And if you find yourself slipping, here’s a tip for quickly boosting self-control. Try thinking about your core values, something you really care about. It could be your partner, your family or a higher ideal. Studies have found this can help boost your self-control in a moment of weakness.
Finally, one of the most important messages emerging from the research is that breaking old habits is hard. The temptation is to bite off more than you can chew, but baby steps are likely to work better.
Try to start with minor bad habits, or only part of your bad habit. For example it may not be possible to tackle unhealthy eating all in one go, but you can, at least, change what you habitually eat for breakfast. With this change under your belt, you can layer another good habit on top, and then another.
For big changes, think small.
Psychologist and PsyBlog creator Jeremy Dean is the author of Making Habits, Breaking Habits: Why We Do Things, Why We Don’t, and
How to Make Any Change Stick (Da Capo Lifelong Books).
