Suzanne Harrington: Join a group to get thin, get sober, or just get through January
Declaring a stringent new January fitness regime accompanied by zero-tolerance clean eating is guaranteed to see you drunk in a McDonalds by the 14th
January is traditionally the month where we hope to swap one kind of six pack for another, although these days the whole new year’s resolutions thing seems a bit quaint, a bit dated. A bit Lent.
These days we don’t give things up as much as let stuff go, like Elsa in Frozen.
Instead of counting our blessings, which sounds old-fashioned and dogmatic, we practise gratitude.
We set intentions, which are the less-intimidating cousins of resolutions — intending to do something or not do something feels less constrictive than resolving; nobody likes backing themselves into a tightly resolute corner.
Declaring a stringent new January fitness regime accompanied by zero-tolerance clean eating is guaranteed to see you drunk in a McDonalds by the 14th; the correlation seems to be the more people you tell, the harder you will fall.
Setting yourself up to fail is always hard — hard on the ego, hard on the outcome, and harder to get started again. Pah, we tell ourselves. That didn’t work. Let’s go to the pub.
Doing stuff communally tends to have a different outcome though, because no man is an island, and since we are all properly digitised now, that community has expanded in every direction, without time constraints or borders, so that there is either an app or a support group for pretty much every venture you can think of — and they all live in your phone.
Your intentions are gamified and made into a communal activity, supporting you while still holding you accountable. Groups work.
Couch to 5K, for instance, is a very different experience than trying to start running alone, going too hard too fast, and ending up back on the couch on Day 3 with a sore knee; Dry January is there for you if you’re gagging for a pint by the weekend; Duolingo even turns verbs and grammar into a game, if your intention is to be able to say more on holiday than “my aunt has a green pencil”.
Groups work even better if you have a reason bigger than yourself to do stuff.
In 2014, when Veganuary first started, 3,300 people signed up. This year, it was 629,000 people.
This is because when you start running or going to the gym or giving up booze or learning Italian, you are the sole beneficiary of your
endeavours, but when you do something that benefits both yourself and the wider world, the incentive to keep going is stronger. You are part of something that is bigger than you.
This creates a sense of belonging, which is what humans crave more than anything, even kebabs after the pub.
This tweak of basic human psychology allows us to join a group — even via an app, where we never physically meet any of the other group members — in order to crack on with our intentions.
It’s how drunk people get sober, how fat people get thin, and how January people get through the month without losing the will to live. Happy days.
