My five best tips for setting New Year’s resolutions

Longtime readers will know I am a big fan of setting New Year’s resolutions. Not necessarily sticking to them, mind you, but setting them, at least.

I figure you fail at 100 per cent of the goals you don’t set for yourself. And, even in instances where my resolutions have failed to “stick” – and there have been many – I still get valuable information to guide me towards better decision-making in the future.

New Year’s resolutions are a vital tool to help the willpower problems which otherwise hold you back.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

Off the back of New Year’s resolutions in recent years, I’ve run a marathon, bought a home, written a book and taken control of my finances.

This year has been a year of mixed results. I only lasted seven months into my year of “no alcohol” before making an active decision during the Delta lockdown to enjoy a tipple. But that was seven months longer than I would have gone with no resolution, and I am still drinking far less today as a result of the break.

Of course, if we were all perfect rational agents, as assumed by traditional economics, this annual ritual of resolution-making would be entirely unnecessary.

At any given moment, of any particular day, we’d simply engage in rational calculations of the future costs and benefits of alternative courses of action and choose whichever would maximise our total “utility”, or happiness.

We don’t do this, of course. As a species we are riddled with problematic thinking patterns, like “hyperbolic discounting” (the tendency to excessively discount the value we will get from future consumption) and “loss aversion” (our tendency to fear potential losses more than we value commensurate potential gains).

And while New Year’s resolutions may, on the surface, appear just another of these faulty thought patterns, they are, in fact, one of the ways we have evolved as a species to overcome our other faults.

That is the broad conclusion of a fascinating 2014 paper titled “The Fresh Start Effect: Temporal Landmarks Motivate Aspirational Behaviour” written by academics at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

They found that “temporal landmarks” – such as the turn of a new year, month or week – represent important junctures at which humans are capable of deeper “big picture” thinking and also, crucially, of detaching from past and seemingly “flawed” versions of themselves.

“We argue that by relegating previous imperfections to a past self and generating a sense that the current self is superior, temporal landmarks can alter people’s decisions,” they found. In three separate studies, they identified increased searches for the word “diet” on Google at the start of the new year, increased attendance at a university gym and increased use of the website StickK, which enables users to set financial penalties for not achieving their goals.

So, clearly resolutions are something humans commonly do. But do they help?

Also, yes, the researchers concluded. “Even fleeting fresh start feelings following temporal landmarks can potentially be valuable”. Why? Two reasons: “First, the abundance of fresh start opportunities throughout the year offers repeated chances for people to attempt positive self-change, so even if they initially fail, they may subsequently succeed.” Second: “Transient increases in motivation may be sufficient to help people fulfil important one-shot goals such as receiving a medical test.”

So, far from being doomed to fail, your New Year’s resolutions are, in fact, a vital tool to help the willpower problems which otherwise hold you back from achieving your life goals.

Over time, I have honed my own little routine of sitting down in the last week of the year to review last year’s resolutions and to set new ones, which I post to Instagram.

Here are my five top tips for setting yours:

1. Begin thinking about your resolutions at least a few days out from the start of the New Year. Sleep on them a couple of times. Write them down. Visualise what it will be like to tick them off at the end of the year. Can you really see that happening one day? If not, try again.
2. Make more than one resolution, but not too many. I make four each year. One resolution is too much pressure on just one aspect of your life. Too many resolutions and you lose clarity.
3. Make “SMART” resolutions, ie that are “Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound”. A resolution to “lose weight” isn’t a great resolution because you have no method or timeframe for getting there. Going to the gym a certain number of times a week or committing to cook a new healthy recipe each week, by contrast, fit the criteria.
4. Have a mixture of goal timeframes. Don’t load yourself up with too many new daily habits. Try picking only one new daily habit, one weekly habit, a quarterly goal and one annual “once-off” goal.
5. Tell the world. It doesn’t have to be Instagram, but accountability – to a friend or family member – can be an important motivator. In that spirit, here are mine:

• Eat five different coloured fruits or vegetables a day
• Go to the gym four times a week
• Plan and book four holidays or trips out of the city
• Decide a charity to donate my time or money to

Happy resolution making, friends. Given the year that’s just been, there’s never been a better time for a fresh start.

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