The Secret to Keeping New Year’s Resolutions
The key to perseverance is not more willpower, it is allowing yourself more indulgences.
This is the magic combination. High motivation for longterm goals, combined with an ability to offset these high workloads with tactical indulgences that require little or no willpower.
Elite athletes, top business leaders, and artists, who spend extraordinarily long hours at their craft have one thing in common: an understanding of how the brain feeds on reward and how this can help or hinder longterm goals.
Our brains have evolved to survive in scarcity, and as such we possess a baked-in dopamine-fuelled reward circuitry that motivates us to hunt for short-term gratification, like food and sex. For all that humans have evolved to become as rational animals who plan family vacations and play musical instruments, our cognitive kryptonite remains our powerful age-old hardwiring, which can so easily upend our logical and reasoned longterm goals and resolutions.
Despite this evolutionary quandary, there may be workarounds, and understanding willpower is the first step.
A now famous study by well-known psychologist Roy F. Baumeister, pitted two subject groups against one other in a difficult (actually unsolvable) puzzle. Having been deprived of food for several hours, both subject groups arrived hungry. Prior to attempting the puzzle, one test group was permitted to eat warm fresh-baked chocolate cookies; the other group, radishes. Trying to solve an unsolvable puzzle proved frustrating and required a great deal of perseverance. Interestingly, those test subjects who ate the cookies lasted nearly twice as long as the radish eaters, before giving up. The researchers concluded that willpower is a finite resource and that the radish eaters had used up some of their precious willpower reserve trying not to eat the cookies. The analogy is that willpower is somewhat like the gas in your car; you can run out — but you can refill the tank.
The practical takeaway is that one needs to allow for small indulgences to replenish their own willpower “tank”. In short, self control at one task limits the self control at subsequent tasks, and to fix this we need to allow ourselves tactical indulgences throughout our day to free up willpower capacity for more difficult undertakings.
I witnessed this firsthand, during my years as an athlete on the national team. Between the 50km runs and the gut-wrenching intervals, our task was to push each other past conventional physiological barriers. This took tremendous discipline — but what was interesting was how the athletes used their time between workouts. They were very adept at allowing their brains and bodies to fully decompress and unwind, often engaging in hobbies or even slothful activities like lazing about, which was so very antithetical to their day-to-day grit and athleticism. The athletes seemed to instinctively understand that extreme levels of willpower had to be replenished through activities which offered gratification but for which little or no willpower was required. For me, my between-workout outlet was photography, which I loved, and still do. It was relaxing and rewarding and offered a complete reprieve from physical exertion.
I’ve heard the same expressed by business colleagues, who, after being “switched on” for very challenging meetings or presentations, are so glad to board a flight, have a glass of wine, and watch a corny movie. These opposite roles may play a key in sustaining longterm goals.
Baumeister’s finding that willpower is finite, like gas in a car, is not without criticism. Recent studies suggest that willpower should be thought of as an emotion, like anger or happiness, which do not necessarily run out, but which ebb and flow depending on one’s situation, thoughts, or distractions.
From my own research on human performance, it would seem that the missing variable here is whether the individual believes the hard work is worth the effort, which ultimately equates to some degree of reward. As Stanford’s Kelly McGonical suggests, willpower is not simply avoiding fun, it’s also about getting what you want. In other words, it is your short-term wants (which tend to be housed in the more primitive ancestral parts of the brain) versus your longterm goals (which are linked to the more “recently” evolved prefrontal cortex).
This is where high achievers come in. Regardless of their fields, such individuals tend to exhibit unusually high motivation as well as tolerance for workload, surely believing that there will be a tremendous reward for their efforts, rather than a pointless exercise in self-control.
This is the magic combination. High motivation for longterm goals, combined with an ability to offset these high workloads with tactical indulgences that require little or no willpower.
Examples abound. Sir Winston Churchill, amidst the toughest days of his war effort, still afforded himself time to stroll through his beloved rose garden or enjoy a cognac and cigar. Great writers like Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Twain tended to write in the morning and then enjoy their afternoons with walks or social gatherings. Sir Richard Branson, one of the highest achievers of our time, worked tirelessly to build his success, ultimately finding a formula for life that combined business enterprise with fun.
It may seem a rather simple concept, but how our brain seeks reward is the secret to success. The strategy for sustaining willpower seems to come down to how our brain understands reward in two ways: the first is believing that the goal (or resolution) will ultimately offer a reward, which fuels our motivation, and the second is — like the cookie and radish experiment — the smart use of tactical short-term rewards as a way to replenish our willpower reserves. We fail when we make our brain choose between longterm rewards and instant gratification; our evolutionary hardwiring will choose the instant reward — and as smart humans, we will find a narrative that justifies this choice.
Willpower, quite literally “empowering our will”, is a uniquely human capacity to decide that we will delay gratification for a grander ideal, goal, or pursuit. Those who are successful use their short-term wants to empower their long-term motivation. For this year, set your goal and plan how you will get there — but remember to replenish your willpower tank along the way with plenty of instant gratifications that do not conflict with what you want to achieve. For example, if you’re on a new diet, pick gratifying short-term rewards that are not food related. Plan for these rewarding breaks throughout the day and imagine them replenishing your willpower tank. Good luck and have a rewarding year!
