Rational Values Give You Resolutions for Life
To be truly motivated to see a resolution through, you need to know what rational values you intend to spend your life achieving and how the resolution helps you achieve them.
If you’ve ever been a regular gym-goer, you’ve probably witnessed the huge spike in patronage most gyms experience in January. My gym gets swamped every year with people rushing to implement a New Year’s resolution to exercise consistently or lose weight. Yet, by mid-February, all but a few of the new members are gone and the gym is quieter than it was before the upsurge.
We’ve all made New Year’s resolutions that we haven’t kept. A few of mine have included daily thirty-minute guitar practice sessions, cutting out sugar, maintaining a formal weekly schedule, and keeping my home tidy. In all those cases, I either gave up on the practice after a few missed days, or let it fall into a less rigorous version of the resolution (some guitar practice every day or eating less sugar). I’m sure you’ve had similar experiences. So why do we fail to keep up these resolutions?
In thinking and talking to people about this tendency, I’ve identified a couple of reasons for it that hint at a more fundamental problem with the way many people approach goals in general.
Reason No. 1: The Psychology of Special Occasions
One problem with New Year’s resolutions is the arbitrary idea that January 1st is some kind of special time when we should make major changes to our lives.
Leaving aside the fact that the change from one calendar year to the next is a human invention that could just as easily happen at any time of year, January is a particularly bad time to try and implement difficult changes in your life. For one, the festive nature of the Christmas period leaves us in a relaxed but exhausted frame of mind that isn’t conducive to maintaining discipline. Moreover, the pressure of returning to the workplace (depending on your work) and the cold, bleak weather (depending on your location) can sap us of the optimism and energy that a concerted effort to maintain a lifestyle change requires. If we were to pick a particular time of year to try and implement new resolutions, spring would be my suggestion.
But the very idea of having a particular time of year for making and implementing resolutions is flawed. At the very least, it discourages us from starting new habits at other times when we may be in a better situation to see them through. But it also creates a kind of psychological pressure to take the resolutions seriously around New Year’s, accompanied by an unstated but accepted implication that we can forget about the whole thing by Valentine’s Day.
A person who takes commitments seriously doesn’t pay heed to the time of year—they’re as important in July as they are in January.
Reason No. 2: The Broken Streak Effect
Regardless of when we try to start a new habit, a common reason for stopping is that we miss a day or two and declare the project a failure, saying, in effect, “Well, I’ve blown it now, so never mind!”
In his book Atomic Habits, James Clear talks about the importance of not letting a missed day kill a valuable habit. Rather, we need to accept the fact that we will miss a day from time to time and keep going when we do— “never miss twice” as Clear says, because the more days we miss, the easier it is to decide we’ve already given up. One missed day isn’t a failure. Not keeping the habit going after it is.
Without being too lax with ourselves, we should expect with any difficult new way of living that there will be days when we forget to practice our instrument or language, slip up and have a treat or a drink, or simply don’t have time to work out or do our daily challenge. These instances, to an appropriate degree, are a natural part of maintaining a practice, not an indication of failure, unless we know that they’re happening more frequently than can be justified.
From these reasons for failure, we can establish two practical principles for sticking to resolutions:
Don’t tie resolutions to an arbitrary date—start them at any time and regard them as year-round commitments.
Don’t regard occasional missed days as failures—regard them as part of the process of adopting the new practice and keep going after them.
But there’s a deeper problem underlying and explaining these two common causes for failure, and these principles will only serve to delay, not prevent, failure if it is not also addressed.
The Deeper Problem: The Value-Goal Disconnect
Consider any New Year’s (or other) resolution you’ve tried to adopt and ask yourself: Why did I want to adopt it?
The reasons may be myriad. You may have been trying to address a longstanding discomfort or dissatisfaction with your lifestyle, body, or appearance. You may have wanted to achieve a long-held aspiration such as learning a foreign language. Or you may simply have felt a pressure—social or internal—to do something to improve yourself in the new year—to make this year different from the ones before it.
Too often, we accept such desires and feelings without probing more deeply into their causes. It’s easy to feel a sense of pressure to improve your life without identifying the root cause for it, which could be anything from a lack of self-esteem to peer pressure to a recognition of a genuine problem in your current lifestyle—or a combination of these and other causes.
In order to parse apart these causes and form goals that we will actually be motivated to work toward consistently, we must identify the deeper values that we want to obtain by way of adopting that practice. A healthy body, a new skill, or an organized lifestyle are not ends in themselves—they are means to achieving deeper values. In the short term, they may help us achieve excitement, satisfaction, and comfort, but even these are not the ultimate values. To be truly motivated to see a resolution through, you need to know what rational values you intend to spend your life achieving and how the resolution helps you achieve them. By working out what values are in line with the requirements of human life and, within that, what values are deeply meaningful to you, you can come to fully understand that your life is an end in itself, that improving it is a deeply good and rational goal, and that others’ opinions or arbitrary dates shouldn’t bear on your resolve to achieve your values.
The reason that I have, by and large, maintained daily guitar practice for the past two years is that I no longer want, as I once did, to improve my guitar-playing out of a sense of inadequacy at my lack of skill or a desire to impress others. I now want to practice guitar because music is a rational value to me; because music is a way I can express and embody other values such as creativity, reason, and freedom; and because practicing music can improve my life by enhancing my mental sharpness, dexterity, and knowledge of the world. That’s enough to motivate me at any time of year.