Chicago Booth Review Podcast How to Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions

Hal Weitzman: How long do you stick to your New Year’s resolutions? Why is it so hard to keep them going? Is it about the goals we set for ourselves or the way we try to meet those goals? As we head into the new year, can 2024 be that exceptional year where we actually keep up with our resolutions? Welcome to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, where we bring you groundbreaking academic research in a clear and straightforward way. I’m Hal Weitzman and today I’m speaking with one of the world’s leading researchers on motivation, Chicago Booth’s Ayelet Fishbach, a professor of behavioral science and the author of the book, Get It Done, Surprising Lessons From the Science of Motivation. Ayelet Fishbach, welcome back to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast.

Ayelet Fishbach: Happy to be here today.

Hal Weitzman: Now, we brought you in because it’s that time of year when we all... Well I do. Let me talk about myself. We tend to make resolutions around New Year and then very quickly break them. Why is it so hard to stick to the resolutions that we make for New Year?

Ayelet Fishbach: Well, it’s not impossible. It’s not that we completely give up on these resolutions. We actually have the data now. We’ve been following thousands of people over the year and many people do stick to the resolutions. Even more people don’t stick to the resolutions.

Hal Weitzman: Right, so most of us don’t. That’s fair. Tell us, what are the numbers then?

Ayelet Fishbach: So that leads to that. Now my second point, which is sticking to your resolution is not binary. It’s not all or none. Many people tell us that they’re doing, just not as much as they were planning. The most common resolutions for the new year are healthy eating and exercising, and it’s not that we are going to eat nothing healthy and never exercise by next November, but we are probably, most of us, are going to do it less than we were hoping. Why? For the reason that we set the resolution. We set the resolution because it was hard, because we needed this external motivator. There is a resolution. Because it’s hard, we are probably going to plan to do more than what we will do.

Hal Weitzman: So does that mean that the problem is in the setting? That we’re setting them too hard? Should we set them easier or does that mean the problem is in actually just motivating ourselves to stick to what we’ve set?

Ayelet Fishbach: The problem for most people is that we set resolutions that we do not enjoy pursuing at all. Clearly by the fact that you set a resolution, I can infer that you are not super excited to do it. No one set a resolution to watch more TV in the upcoming year, but many people set resolutions that I just don’t feel right when you do it, that there is really no intrinsic motivation in these resolutions and that just doesn’t work. These are the people that tell us, by March, that they just cannot do it. And so what we do is asking about your resolution and then ask you how important that resolution is for you and how much you expect to enjoy that. I have been collecting this data for years now with Kaitlin Woolley who’s now a professor at Cornell, and what we find is that what predicts whether people will adhere to the resolution in March and in June and in August and all the way to the next November and even whether they will set another similar resolution the following year, is how much they enjoy it.

So again, this is not that they have set resolutions that are about eating junk food and watching TV, but they set resolutions that still have some enjoyment in them, that still have some intrinsic motivation. It feels right as you do this.

Hal Weitzman: So just to be clear, the way that you’re going to get there, is not the target itself that’s necessarily too hard, it’s the thinking about the journey to that target.

Ayelet Fishbach: Yeah. So the target is usually very general. People usually are in the health domain or the financial domain. We see many resolutions evolving, getting a job, getting out of debt and so on.

Hal Weitzman: So people will say something like, “I want to eat more healthily.” They don’t actually define what that means. Is that right?

Ayelet Fishbach: Yeah. Well they define for themselves and we can ask, “Well what are you planning to do and how much you expect to enjoy it?” And you all might say, “Well, I’m going to start cooking all these amazing veggies that I’ve been curious about,” and someone else might say, “I’m going to force myself to eat rice patties.” And you can guess who’s more likely to stick with the resolutions. I don’t even know why rice patties exist. They taste like nothing. And so if you have a plan that is something that you will enjoy doing, you have a better chance.

Hal Weitzman: I see. But regardless of how hard it is, that’s what I’m trying to get at, so even if I set a really hard target, but if the target is enjoyable, if I say, “I’m really, I’m going to go swimming every single day,” and I love swimming, then that’s not too ambitious a target because it’s something that I really enjoy. Whereas if I set a much lower target on something that I cannot stand like eating rice cakes, then it’s much harder to stick to, just because of the thing itself. Is that right?

Ayelet Fishbach: Most resolutions don’t actually come with a target and what you’re saying is let’s put a target on it, let’s put an ambitious number. So you tell me my resolution is to be swimming. Well, how much? Are you going to do it every day? For how long? Adding target is actually useful and the target is probably going to be too ambitious, but that is fine, as long as you’re not too hard with yourself. Let’s say, most resolutions don’t come with a target.

Hal Weitzman: Right. So even just putting a number on it can be helpful. Is that right? Regardless whether you hit the number or not.

Ayelet Fishbach: Absolutely. The idea with numbers is that we see anything below the number as a loss. If you said that you want to swim seven times a week and you only swim six times a week, you see this as a loss and you are highly motivated to get to the seven. So targets are motivating, but then most of us set targets that are a bit unrealistic.

Hal Weitzman: Right. Yeah. We tend to be over-optimistic, which could help anchor us. It could help make us do more than we would’ve done even if we don’t hit the target. Is that right?

Ayelet Fishbach: Yes. Optimism can be a good motivational strategy. Now, optimism can also be just planning fallacy. You just look at your calendar and it looks like there is time for swimming every day, but actually once you put the work and the shopping and the daycare and everything else, there is no longer the time that you envision and this is just a cognitive fallacy. They’re just not enough hours in the day when you actually get there. The other effect is motivational and this one is actually adaptive. We set optimistic targets and we are optimistic and that motivates us to do a little bit more than we would do if we didn’t have these optimistic targets. If you set your goal at swimming just once a month, well I’m sure you will meet it, but you are probably going to swim less than if you set it at seven times a week.

Hal Weitzman: That makes sense. You talked about the need to make things enjoyable, what you call intrinsic motivation, in order to stick with them. Is that the biggest mistake that people make in New Year’s resolutions? They just pick something that feels hard because it sounds like a good ambitious target, but then they just fail miserably ‘cause it’s so horrible to do.

Ayelet Fishbach: In our data this is absolutely the biggest mistake, is basically not having empathy to your future self, not thinking about what I will enjoy doing, and so setting yourself up to run a marathon when you don’t even like running.

Hal Weitzman: Let me turn to something positive because there is some research, isn’t there, that suggests that a time like New Year when we tend to think, “It’s a new year,” or, “It’s a Monday,” or, “It’s the beginning of,” whatever, “spring,” that we tend to think of that as a good time to make a resolution and it is. Explain that a little bit. Or it could be, let me put it that way.

Ayelet Fishbach: We are highly motivated at the beginning of pursuing a goal and so beginnings are motivating. We usually see this. It’s as what some call the first start effect, and so we are highly motivated at the beginning of the day. Our breakfast tends to be healthier than our dinner. We are highly motivated at the beginning of the week. We are also highly motivated at the beginning of the year. And what’s nice about this beginning of the year is that we also have conversation about it, we know that others are setting resolutions, so we have the social support, which is so important for motivation.

We then see that motivation tend to decline. If there is a very clear end to the goal, then motivation picks up again. For example, we see that people are highly motivated to make the last purchase on a reward program. I just finished a 1000-piece puzzle with my son last night. We were very motivated to put the last 10 pieces in the puzzle, but for goals that we set for the new year, which often like healthy eating, exercising, being more financially responsible, there is no clear end and so we are highly motivated at the beginning and from there it declines and there’s some data that people are doing less and purchase foods that are less good for them as we progress in the year. Use the start and try to keep it at that. Try to think of every week as a start, not just the beginning of the year.

Hal Weitzman: Right. So that’s what I was going to say. Is there a way of designing the goal so it has a short...? So you cut out that middle part, so you’re always either starting or ending. Should you make it a weekly goal instead of a yearly goal, if that makes sense?

Ayelet Fishbach: The shorter you can do it, that would still make sense, the better. Short goals have less of a middle. They have beginning and end and it starts again. So most people intuitively set their exercising goal as a weekly goal, not as an annual goal.

Hal Weitzman: And that’s right.

Ayelet Fishbach: And that’s right. And take something like saving for retirement, which is a really hard goal because it goes on for so many years. Most people would know to think about it in terms of annual savings and not, “What I’m going to save through my entire career,” and they’re right.

Hal Weitzman: One of the things that happens with goals is, I think you call it in your book, Get it Done, you call it something like the what the hell or what the heck effect, which is if I say I’m always going to eat healthy, by the time I’ve eaten a couple of doughnuts, I may as well finish the box and eat all 12 or whatever. So I get to a point where, “Well, I’ve failed anyway, so why not fail big?” We’re all going to fail at some point. How do you keep the focus on failing small and saying, “Okay, two doughnuts you’ve had, you’ve done that now, but don’t therefore eat another 10?"

Ayelet Fishbach: That’s a good question. The data suggests that when we fail it’s really hard to go back, which is why I would say before when you set your target, be gentle with yourself. You say, “I would like to do this five times a week,” or, “I would like to eat that much healthy food,” but know that you are a little bit optimistic and that’s fine. Know that you are setting the upper limit of what is possible for you and then when you fail, be forgiving, be willing to learn from failure.

It is extremely hard. In my other stream of research with Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, now with Northwestern, we found that most of the time when people fail they either don’t learn anything or they learn the wrong lesson, which is, “I cannot do it,” which is, Hal, exactly what you described now. “Well I had done it, obviously I will never be able to eat healthily,” and this is learning the wrong lesson. You can ask yourself, “Why did I eat something that I now regret? Okay, what was in the situation? How can I not be in that situation again?” Or you can tell yourself that a donut is your prize for being a good person until then and from then on.

Hal Weitzman: Let me ask you some personal advice ‘cause I try to build failure into my system. So for example, I try not to drink alcohol during the week or eat bread, but on Friday and Saturday I will. I give myself a special break, so I look forward to that and that’s, for me, I feel like it might be motivating. Occasionally I do have a drink or eat some bread, but usually I pretty much stick to that. Is that a wise thing to do, to build some relief release into your system?

Ayelet Fishbach: There is no great data on that. Definitely there is some people who give the advice of rewarding yourself with temptations. I cannot say that I saw in the data that it’s better to try to never have the food that you think that you should not have or have it in moderation. Clearly we should all eat. So whatever we do there is to be some moderation there. If it works for you, then that’s fine. Let me say that it’s also true that the less you drink, the less you want to drink. So we often make a mistake of assuming that our preferences are stable and they are not. If we start introducing new foods to our diet, we are going to start liking them. If we start a new exercise, maybe we’ll discover that we don’t like it, but it’s quite possible that our preferences will change and we will discover that we enjoy it after we do it a few times.

So allow yourself to grow, allow yourself to try out new things and see if your preferences will change. I would say that if you don’t eat bread during the week, you probably don’t really crave it on the weekend. You have changed your preferences.

Hal Weitzman: You’re telling me I don’t need the alcohol or the bread at all.

Ayelet Fishbach: If you don’t have it-

Hal Weitzman: You’re taking away all my pleasures,

Ayelet Fishbach: Well, watch TV.

Hal Weitzman: Yeah, okay. Well, I try not to do that either. So let’s try and summarize some of the knowledge that you’ve shared with us. So if I’m thinking now, “Okay, it’s a few days till the new year,” how should I be designing those goals to make sure that I stick with them as long as possible?

Ayelet Fishbach: Start with thinking what are the goals that are important for you? What are you trying to achieve in 2024? Maybe you need to remove some goals that you were pursuing that are no longer useful for you. Maybe you want to add some, maybe you want to try out new things. There is a bit of just thoughtfulness that goes into this time of the year and just thinking what I want to do and then realize that the person that you’re going to be in February is awfully similar to the person that you are today. And so you need to make a plan for them that they will be intrinsically motivated to pursue. They will enjoy it, they will find it fulfilling, they will be curious about it. They would want to explore. If you plan to punish your future self for what you don’t like about your past self, uh-uh, that’s not going to work.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. Well, Ayelet Fishbach, I should ask you before we finish, do you have a New Year’s resolution for this year?

Ayelet Fishbach: I do. I plan to be healthier in 2024.

Hal Weitzman: Just to be healthier. That sounds nice and vague, but you’ve got some ideas about how you’re going to measure your progress and keep yourself motivated, presumably?

Ayelet Fishbach: Give me a couple of days, I’ll get back to you. I’m still working on the details.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. All right. We don’t have long to go. All right, excellent. Ayelet Fishbach, thank you so much for coming on the Chicago Booth Review Podcast and offering us your advice.

Ayelet Fishbach: Well, thanks for having me. And before I leave Hal, what are your New Year’s resolutions, if you have any at all?

Hal Weitzman: Well, I want to try and keep this podcast going every week, so that’s one of them. So far I think we’re on track and for me personally, last year I said I was going to read a little bit of a non-fiction book every night, and I think it lasted till about the 15th of January, so I’m going to try and pursue that again. I do like to do it, but usually what happens is I do what my mom always did for many years, which is I get into bed with the book and next thing I know it’s the morning and the book is on my face. So I usually don’t actually get it done, but I’ll take your advice, try and think of it as a good target and be kind to myself and try and stick to it. Thanks again for coming on the Chicago Booth Review Podcast.

Ayelet Fishbach: Thank you.

Hal Weitzman: That’s it for this episode of the Chicago Booth Review Podcast. If you want to learn more and test your knowledge about the science of motivation, take our tiny course, five video modules and quizzes that you can complete in less than an hour. You can find it on our website at chicagobooth.edu/review. When you’re there, sign up for our weekly newsletter so you never miss the latest in business-focused academic research. This episode was produced by Josh Stunkel. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe and please do leave us a five-star review. Until next time, I’m Hal Weitzman. Thanks for listening and from all of us at Chicago Booth Review, have a very happy and healthy 2024.