Why New Years Resolutions Never Work

It’s January 1st. Every year, this date rolls around, and all our big dreams that have manifested over the previous year get kick-started, or so we want to believe. We hype up the first of January like it’s the “reset we needed” to finally get up off our asses and do something useful towards the goals we desperately want to achieve. So why do we constantly fail?

Research from Forbes reveals “that almost a third (30%) of Brits will be setting New Year’s resolutions in 2024. The research revealed that a further 8% are yet to decide whether or not they will set goals for the coming year.” and yet… “On the whole, almost one in six people (approximately 17%) stick to their resolutions for four to six months. Another 9% persist with their goals for six to nine months, and 6% for nine to 12 months.”

That means that nearly 95% of people surveyed won’t stick it out for the full year. That’s a failure rate almost equivalent to the rejection rate at Harvard university.

What is it about these commitments we make that means it’s almost certain we will give up?

In my work as a mindset coach, it’s kind of the name of the game to get people to make behavioural change and then stick to it.

Can you imagine if I had a 95% failure rate with my clients? I wouldn’t be a coach for very long if it were almost certain that people’s behaviours wouldn’t change.

This got me thinking, why is it that I can get people to change their behaviour, but when it’s your average Joe trying to make a change in their lives, they struggle?

The answer is actually quite simple. The first reason is the explanation, the actual mindset shift that needs to occur. The second two reasons end up being very easily actionable solutions.

Here’s the 3 simplest reasons most people don’t stick to their New Year’s Resolutions:

Reason 1: It’s Easier Not To

A mentor once asked me, “If you had to give someone who was really fat, like medically obese, the simplest advice on how to lose weight possible, what would you tell them?”

“Eat less, move more” was the best I could come up with. With all the fitness content that’s on the internet now, I feel like that’s a pretty fair TLDR of the 80/20 of losing weight.

My mentor then asked me, “if that was the case, why don’t people do it?” and I paused… I couldn’t come up with a sensible answer that would concisely explain people’s behaviour. I wanted to believe that I had accurately summed up the most straightforward path to achieving the outcome, but their question had caught me out. If the advice I had come up with was that simple, why wouldn’t this be the default behaviour?

I then came up with as many reasons as I could think of for why people wouldn’t take this simple advice. I played devil’s advocate against myself. I came to the same conclusion as everyone else I’ve asked this same question to: my pithy advice is kinda bullshit, it’s not always true, it’s more difficult than that, there are individual differences, there are nuances, there are so many factors that go into the individual in question losing weight that something as simple as “eat less, move more” can’t be reasonable advice.

This means the average person operates in the shades of grey, they have no option but the deal with the infinite nuance of the individual, and no advice that is remotely generic can be helpful because it doesn’t deal with their specific concoction of individual differences.

My mentor had a different idea.

“People don’t do the thing not because it’s hard, or there are nuanced explanations, but because it’s easier not to.”

This was like a bombshell.

I started to play with the advice in my head. Applying it to different situations, seeing whether this was actually reasonable.

Losing weight: it’s hard to eat healthy = it’s easier not to eat healthy, it’s hard to find time to exercise = it’s easier not to change your schedule and make time to exercise, I am so different to the average person that I can’t lose weight the traditional way = it’s easier not to find and implement multiple methods of losing weight to see which one works for me.

Oh. Even at the most detailed version of the rebuttal, “it’s easier not to” is still a valid conclusion and explanation.

It is, in fact, easier not to do any of the things that we know will get us closer to achieving our goals.

For example, it’s theoretically easy to go to the gym, you get off your butt, either get in the car or walk to the gym, follow a program you find on Google, and leave the gym at the end of it. None of that is inherently tricky. It’s not rocket surgery to do any or all of those individual actions.

However.

It’s definitely easier not to.

It’s easier not to get off your butt, because it’s raining outside, and you’re busy right now on that work project, and you’re tired because of the kids. Sure, it would be easy to get up and do it, but that would require energy that you don’t have right now, so it’s easier not to get up.

It’s easier not to leave the house because you’re busy as is, and the car doesn’t have enough gas in it, and you’re already behind on the day and leaving feels like way too much work. Sure, it would be easy to go to the gym; it’s not that far away, but that requires a whole ordeal that you don’t want to go through, so it’s easier not to leave the house.

It’s easier not to follow a program you find on google, because how do you know whether it’s a good program, you’d have to do a bunch of research on who writes good program, you’d probably have to pay someone to do it custom for you and your old injuries, and you don’t want to spend money on doing any of that. Sure, you could follow a random one you find, but that might not get you the results you want, so it’s easier not to do it until you know who the right person to listen to is.

Definitely easier not to…

We create narratives that justify our pre-existing belief that it’s easier not to do something, and that means we can not bother to start or give ourselves excuses not to follow through if we have started.

Reason 2: Low Stakes

For most people, there’s no downside risk if they fail a New Year’s Resolution. Nobody’s keeping score; nobody is going to care if they don’t follow through, apart from themselves.

With this in mind, who really cares if you do fail?

Ultimately, this is an integrity question – do you keep your word to yourself?

If the answer to that question is no, it kind of explains why you’re in a position to need to start New Year’s Resolutions.

So, for most people who fail New Year’s Resolutions, the core problem is that their word doesn’t mean much, so making a promise to themselves doesn’t mean much either.

How do you solve this?

Add stakes.

For example, a client of mine had to do 90 days of consecutive work on a problem she had been putting off for years. If she missed a single day of the work she had to donate >$10,000 to an anti-charity (an organisation that supports something you personally hate).

Guess how motivated she was to keep up with doing the work every day?

Recently, my friend was lamenting to me about being overweight and wanting to lose weight. I told him that the reason he hadn’t managed it before this was that the stakes weren’t high enough. So, we added stakes.

If he doesn’t drop 20lbs in the next 6 months, he has to lose all the hair on his head. Eyebrows, beard, head hair. The works.

Guess who (at the time of writing) is down 10lbs at the end of Month 2.

No stakes? No action.

If you want to achieve something, set the stakes higher than you think are necessary.

Reason 3: No Accountability

When people set New Year's Resolutions, they often will tell people that they’re doing something, but nobody enforces their decisions or commitments. It’s not someone else’s job to make you commit to doing it; it’s your job, the common perspective goes.

The problem with this is that if nobody is there to crack the whip when you feel like going off the central reservation, you’ll inevitably fail. But this requires people around you who genuinely want the best for you. Most people, it’s sad to say, don’t have that.

However, what most, if not all, of us have are people who want to see us fail.

Schadenfreude is universal, even in the nicest people you know; everyone has a part of their brain that is hardwired to be receptive to schadenfreude; therefore, give the people what they want!

Combining reasons 2 and 3 means you get the ultimate hack to completing anything: give people an opportunity to see you suffer a dreadful fate if you fail.

I can almost guarantee that the aunt who’s always in your business will absolutely check in to see if you are up to date on whatever your New Year’s Resolution is if when you fail you have to pay her $100. If your penance for failing is that you have to get a full-body wax and you’re a hairy guy, I bet your buddies are going to be asking you every single day if you’re on track or not.

Now you have people actively checking in on you, even if they want you to fail it will motivate you to prove them wrong, and you’ll have the intrinsic motivation to avoid whatever awful punishment you’ve come up with.

In the same vein as this: I’m doing something insane.

5% of people manage to stick with a New Years Resolution for a year.

I’m going to put my money where my mouth is.

I’m going to commit to posting a video on my socials (@davidjacob_1) every single day, achieving 12 different New Year’s Resolutions over the course of the year.

If I don’t post a video every day, I lose all the hair on my head and face.

Bye-bye eyebrows, beard and head hair.

The New Year’s Resolutions are all focused on four key parts of my life:

Health, Wealth, Faith and Relationships.

Tune in for tomorrow’s newsletter to find out more about how I came to these Resolutions!

Best

D