Moving beyond the New Year’s charade
New Year’s resolutions are a charade. The concept is great — “starting fresh” each January. But banging out a list of to-dos that never stick is an ill-fated exercise for one reason: willpower is a weak agent of change.
Numerous studies confirm that relying on willpower to follow through on our goals is a strategy that is destined to fail. But rather than trashing the tradition, we need to go bigger. We need to use the turning of the calendar to push ourselves to really grow. The better way of starting fresh is to deepen and refine a vision of our “Best Self.”
Best Self is the self that we aspire to be, and it can only be defined individually since it is deeply personal. It is the self that, for most of us, eats moderately, controls its temper, is ambitious and productive, nurtures loved ones and enjoys the moment. To top it off, Best Self expresses the fullness of our individuality. Our Best Self operates “as if”: as if we were our own best friend giving ourselves advice; as if we were being filmed in real time for all the world to judge; as if we were behaving in perfect concert with our values.
To help clarify our Best Self, there is a crucial question to ask ourselves: How will future me evaluate the choices I make right now?
This question forces us to be accountable for our decisions and behaviours in a way that willpower does not. Will future me be impressed that I fired off an angry email that escalated a conflict? Will future me be pleased that I ate two chocolate bars because I was feeling drowsy? Will future me congratulate me tomorrow morning if I stay up late watching a crappy movie? Our future selves bear the brunt of our bad decisions, and benefit from our good ones. But because future me isn’t here, right now, it relies on Best Self to represent its interests in the present moment.
Competing with future-oriented Best Self are the various present selves whose needs are immediate and pressing. These selves are rarely willing to compromise — the lazy self, the gluttonous one, the selfish one and the self-righteous one. While other animals simply follow their instincts, to be human is to be challenged by inner conflict, which forces us to negotiate with ourselves across time in an epic intertemporal clash between futureoriented Best Self and the present-focused others. New Year’s resolutions don’t solve the problem of rivalling selves because self-control is a limited resource that we typically overestimate: when we are in cold states, not immediately experiencing our hot impulses, we forget how dominating those impulses can be when they arise.
Rather than let cold-state, futurefocused Best Self fight it out with hot-state, present-dominated selves and hope that willpower prevails, we need a way to advantage Best Self. And that is precisely what good habits do. Habits are plows that cut paths to our desired futures.
How? Habits foster automaticity. Habits reduce optionality. Habits make the decisions for us by nudging us down pre-selected paths that become our default behaviours. Good habits invest power in Best Self by initiating a virtuous circle in which our self-concept and behaviours reinforce one another. We can boost this circle with the force multiplier of saying to ourselves, “I am the kind of person who...”, as in,
I am the kind of person who pauses before responding angrily to provocation; I am the kind of person who stops eating before I am overfull; I am the kind of person who always prioritizes my kids when they need me.
This is the time of year to go bigger than an idle list of resolutions. It’s the time of year to think about the kind of person you want to be and the habits that will bring that person to life. Aim to give your Best Self its fullest expression in 2022.