Act now not later

For the self-help industry, the most wonderful time of the year arrives not at Christmas but in the weeks immediately afterward — that segment of the calendar known to publishers and motivational speakers worldwide as ‘New Year, New You’.

The symbolic power of the date 01/01 is considerable, given that most of us will make a New Year’s resolutions this year. Quitting smoking and losing weight will loom largest in our plans. Spoiler alert: most of them will fail.

It’s a curious truth about the happiness industry that, unlike most other industries, it doesn’t have much to gain from selling a product that actually works. The doctrine of positive thinking that underpins modern self-help rests on circular logic: when a given technique fails, the implication goes, it’s because you weren’t thinking positively enough — and so you need positive thinking even more.

In reality, psychological research increasingly suggests that repeating “affirmations” makes people with low self-esteem feel worse — that visualising your ambitions can make you less motivated to achieve them; that goal setting can backfire and that emotions can’t be controlled through sheer force of will.

“The key to success,” argues the best-selling motivational writer Brian Tracy, “is to focus our conscious mind on things we desire, not things we fear.”

Messages like Tracy’s deliver a short-lived mood boost, and when that fades, the most obvious way to revive it is to go back for more. If this unhelpful approach reaches a peak at the New Year, perhaps it’s because the lure of the “complete fresh start” is so strong.

The problem is that successful change rarely works that way. To be sure, it makes intuitive sense to imagine that radical, across-the-board changes would be the most effective ones, because each change would support the others. Develop the habit of going daily to the gym, for instance, and you’d assume you’d naturally also become the kind of health-minded person who avoids junk food. But a large, (albeit contested), body of evidence suggests that willpower is a unitary and depletable resource — the more of it you use making one change, the less you’ll have left over to make others. The discipline you exert on building the exercise habit, initially at least, leaves you more susceptible to burgers rather than less.

Actually achieving the Total Life Makeover, much promised around this time of year, would require impossible psychological acrobatics: somehow you’d have to change everything about yourself while simultaneously being the self who is directing the changes. Good luck with that.

Fortunately, there are more promising alternatives. If you must make resolutions, it’s preferable to make tiny individual ones, repeatedly throughout the year, rather than multiple, ambitious ones at the start of it. Research by the psychologists Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, concludes that regular minor accomplishments — “small wins” — contribute much more to happiness than do occasional, bigger ones. And, contrary to what you might expect, the satisfactions of a bigger achievement aren’t proportionately larger or more long-lasting.

Tiny goals, even absurdly tiny ones, can be an effective way to sneak under the radar of your mind, which always stands ready to procrastinate on, or otherwise resist, bigger ambitions. You might laugh at the idea of doing 15 seconds of exercise, but for exactly that reason, you’re also much less likely to resist it. (The next day, make it 20 seconds, and so on.)

Instead of working on specific goals, a wiser approach may be to set “process” goals. Rather than deciding to write the novel of the century, commit to 45 minutes of writing every morning.

“Nothing discourages the concentration necessary to perform well,” writes the sports psychologist John Eliot, in his book, Overachievement, more than “worrying about the outcome.”

Or try the process-goal method used by Jerry Seinfeld early in his career, when he was determined to spend some time every day writing jokes. On a wall calendar, he marked an X every day that he got some writing done, gradually creating a chain of X’s.

The only focus is not to break the chain — it’s a mechanical, non-intimidating target. If Seinfeld had aimed instead at “becoming a world-famous comedian,” might he have sabotaged his success?

There’s a deeper problem with the New Year’s resolution phenomenon, though. In its modern form, at least, it’s just one more expression of the self-help industry’s obsession with “getting motivated”, for finding ways to cultivate the right emotional state to achieve greatness. !

But this way of thinking about motivation isn’t the solution: it’s part of the problem. First, its effects are only fleeting — in fact, as Japanese psychologist Shoma Morita liked to point out, it’s perfectly possible to do what you know needs doing — to propel yourself to the gym, to open the laptop to work — without “feeling motivated” to do it. Morita advised his readers and patients to “give up” on themselves — to “begin taking action now, while being neurotic or imperfect or any other label by which you inaccurately describe yourself.”

* Oliver Burkeman is the author of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking. (c) 2012, Newsweek, Inc. All rights reserved.