Here's Why Your New Year's Resolutions are Already Broken

Neck-deep in the lands of $2 double cocktails in Northern California, it took me all of 14 hours of the new year before I’d broken my resolution to not drink heavily on Sunday. Meanwhile, my Facebook feed is filled with people complaining about the transient gym-goers who show up to work out for at most a month at the beginning of every year. On top of that, I keep overhearing talk about the pounds one gains after January 1 and a stretch of careful holiday eating.

I mean, come on. No one is surprised by this. We complain about resolutions every year, while in the same breath saying that we know we’ll fail, and yet we try anyway. What is the matter with us? Are we biologically hardwired to get a sick pleasure out of failing at self-improvement?

A curious aspect of the human condition is that, for the whole of our history, we’ve never been fully satisfied with what we’ve got. We’re on a constant quest to get smarter and faster, and make life easier, more efficient, and more enriching. Sure, crows use tools, elephants care for and mourn their sick and dead, and hyenas work together by hunting in packs. We’re not alone in the animal world in modifying our behavior and innovating new strategies to better succeed; that’s a basic consequence of evolution. But we are unique in that our behavior and technology evolves at an extremely rapid pace.

In that sense, it’s no surprise that we make resolutions. We’re already trying to improve ourselves, our situation, and our immediate environment (not necessarily the environment as a whole, but that’s another story) all the time. Making New Year’s resolutions is a way to set solid milestones, to make concrete our goals. The tradition as a whole is at least partially the confluence of the new year symbolizing a fresh start, and the competitiveness of human nature. We figure the new year is a clean slate to work with, and if everyone else is taking advantage of it to better themselves (and bragging about how successful they are at quitting smoking on Twitter), then we might as well try too.

But, if we’re the superstars of self-improvement in the animal world, why is it that so many of us have already failed at keeping our resolutions, or soon will? Partially to blame is the sheer inertia of what we’re trying to change.

For the vast majority of human history, our resource needs weren’t that much different that any other animal’s. Even following the advent of agriculture, calories were costly and we worked our butts off every day. After millenniums of modern civilization, it was still kingly for European royalty to be fat and prestigious for Japanese royals to be pale because both signified that one was wealthy enough to not worry about food or work. Meanwhile, everyone else was eating everything they could and scoring every sedentary moment they might, as both of those commodities have been hard to come by for much of our history.

In a world with well-stocked grocery stores and fast food on every corner, and in which our work often consists of driving somewhere to sit at a desk, we no longer need to struggle for calories and rest, but we’ve yet to biologically evolve beyond hunter-gatherer mode. One day we might change to only want low-carb diets and gym workouts, but until then, our biology does play a role in not wanting to do either.

Although it’s extremely complicated, quitting an addiction has a similar biological component. Smoking and drinking, for example, both have effects on brain chemistry and habitual behavior that make quitting more difficult than behavior modification that’s less ingrained in our system. Remembering to always turn off the light when you leave a room provides a lot fewer hurdles than trying to give up the cancer sticks, and it’s partly due to your biology.

But, having mentioned that, let me state this clearly: no one can simply use our biological history as an excuse for failing resolutions. As evidenced by millions upon millions of humans, from blind Everest climbers to those who have quit smoking, started eating better, and exercising more, we truly aren’t beholden to our biological urges.

What seems to really be causing us to give up on resolutions is our collective inability to acknowledge that our will power is a finite resource. Making the kinds of changes we aim for with resolutions are all difficult because of how ingrained they our in our own chemistry, but they are certainly not insurmountable. But by setting grand goals for changes that all have to happen at the same time, we set ourselves up to quickly get exhausted with the whole effort.

As Jonah Lehrer wrote in an excellent piece on neuroscience and will power a few years back,

Willpower, like a bicep, can only exert itself so long before it gives out; it’s an extremely limited mental resource.

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.

Lehrer goes on to describe research in which subjects were given either two or seven numbers to remember, then told to go into another room and decide to snack on a slice of cake or some fruit salad. Overwhelmingly, the students with more to remember chose cake, which suggests that, with how busy we all are, our brains may be so full that any added bit of workload makes it easier to succumb to temptation.

When it comes to New Year’s resolutions, we’re already fighting an uphill battle with many of our goals, but it’s not insurmountable. But when we add in the specific pressure of making a resolution, the stresses of returning to work and facing the new year, and the occasionally frazzled state we’re left in after the holidays, resolutions burn through our reserves of will power too quickly. Rather than stressing ourselves out by demanding a bunch of big changes in just one period of the year, it’s a better idea to spend the whole year working on what we want to improve on while expecting that change takes time. At the very least, that’s what I’m telling myself.

Follow Derek Mead on Twitter. Have a question? Write Derek at derek(at)motherboard.tv.