Hope springs eternal. At least on New Year’s. On this first of January, the coming year is a blank slate. It’s a time when we can set our goals – to exercise more, to eat less, to perform our best – in the hopes of making 2019 a year that we can look back on with pride. There’s one problem, though: the success rate for New Year’s resolutions is pretty bleak. Less than 10% of resolutions have been kept by year’s end and 25% fail before 15 January.
In a society as obsessed with success as ours – where bestsellers offering advice on how to be gritty, goal-directed, and disciplined line the shelves of almost every bookstore – this seems a rather odd situation. If the advice science has been offering for how to reach goals is on target, why are the success rates so low? It’s because the advice we’re being given is wrong.
To understand why, we should consider what resolutions are. At base, they’re almost all a form of a dilemma economists term intertemporal choice, meaning decisions that have different consequences as time unfolds. Keeping resolutions usually requires accepting some sacrifice in the moment to gain rewards in the future. For example, regularly putting money in an IRA (independent retirement account) rather than spending it to enjoy the newest smartphone or overpriced restaurant helps ensure a more enjoyable retirement; eating a kale salad for lunch, while maybe not bringing as much immediate enjoyment as a double cheeseburger, helps ensure a healthier future.
Yet while most of us would agree with this logic, we don’t typically follow it. Research by Kathleen Vohs at the University of Minnesota shows that, on average, people give into temptations that conflict with their long-term goals about one out of every five times they try to resist – a figure that rises rapidly if they’re tired, busy or stressed.
The root of the problem is that our brains have a bit of a glitch: they over-value immediate pleasures relative to future ones. For example, in my own research, we found that people view $100 in a year as worth only $17 today. Or, put differently, if we gave them $17 dollars today, they’d forgo getting $100 in a year. Unless you need that money for immediate survival, turning down the opportunity to quintuple your money in a year doesn’t make much sense. Yet, people continually use such questionable “logic” with all types of rewards.
The way we’re usually told to resist desires for immediate pleasures that get in the way of pursuing long-term goals is to use willpower. If you want to get a promotion or better grades this year, put your nose to the grindstone rather than spending time listening to music you enjoy. If you want to lose weight, force yourself to go to the gym rather than revel in an extra helping of dessert. Logical, yes; easy, no. A good deal of research shows that it’s difficult and often stressful to continually force yourself to choose the less of two desirable options. But in truth, that’s what it means to use willpower.
And herein lies the problem. What all those bestsellers neglect to say is that willpower isn’t the only tool that fosters the self-control and grit we need for success. The mind comes equipped with another powerful source of motivation: emotions. And when it comes to problems of intertemporal choice – ones where we need to be more oriented toward future goals – the emotions that matter are the moral ones.
For most of human history, what led to success was good character. You had to be seen as a good partner, as someone worth cooperating with. That meant you had to be honest, fair and generous; acts that require making a sacrifice to share, as opposed to being selfish, in the moment to ensure greater rewards in the future. And it was emotions such as gratitude, compassion and a pride in one’s true abilities and reputation that supported these virtues, a fact backed up by modern psychological science.
What our research has demonstrated, however, is that these emotions help people resist temptation not by increasing willpower, but by simply nudging the mind to place a greater emphasis than it normally would on future rewards relative to immediate ones. For instance, grateful people don’t see $100 in a year as worth only $17 today. To them, it’s worth double that. And similar effects are found for pride and compassion.
The upshot, of course, is that by increasing the value people place on future gains, these emotions make persevering toward those goals much easier. And as you’d expect, regularly feeling these emotions has been shown to increase time spent on difficult tasks, to reduce procrastination, to increase regular exercise, to enhance performance on the job, and to reduce addictive or impulsive behaviors – all things that require resisting temptations that divert people from pursuing future success.
Unlike relying on willpower, cultivating these emotions throughout the coming year offers a less stressful way to help keep your promises to yourself intact. Yet doing so also offers an added benefit. It will make sure that as you’re striving to reach your goals, you will be strengthening your relationships. Practicing gratitude, compassion and an authentic pride (as opposed to hubris) binds you to others, and in so doing, makes certain that you’ll look back on 2019 not only as a year where you reached a personal goal, but also made a difference in the lives of those around you.
David DeSteno is professor of psychology at Northeastern University
