New Year's Resolutions

Our church secretary changes her sign with funny messages each week. This was the one we saw on January 5th, and I thought that it neatly summed up the dilemma of new year's resolutions.

Resolutions are a topic of great interest for health behavior change researchers like me. They are fascinating because everyone makes them, despite the fact that everyone also knows they are going to break them! One could see this as a triumph of hope over experience. But our self-awareness about the problem suggests that it's more than that. Instead, it is a classic example of the intention-behavior gap highlighted in Two Minds Theory.

Famous psychologists have been interested in this problem. Stanley Schacter studied self-change efforts among smokers, and concluded that people are actually more successful than we might think in improving their health behaviors. It just seems to take them a long time and multiple attempts. James Prochaska, famous for developing the stages of change, took issue with Schachter's results and suggested that people really do need help changing their behavior because it's so hard to do on one's own. (It's kind of an interesting position for Prochaska, who would later argue that a public health approach to reach the most people with the simplest interventions is best -- but his argument with Schacter happened before he was famous, and indeed before he had fully formulated the stages of change). Prochaska's frequent collaborator John Norcross later identified variables that predict who succeeds in their New Year's resolutions versus who fails. The variables themselves aren't too surprising: high self-efficacy, already having the needed skills, and high motivation for change.

New Year's resolutions are also an example of Prochaska's general rule that self-change efforts often fizzle between 3 and 6 months (the time that he has suggested is needed to move from the "action" to the "maintenance" stage of behavior change). The same timeframe is suggested by Alcoholics Anonymous, a group laser-focused on one particular type of health behavior change, which recommends "90 meetings in 90 days" because the first 3 months are such a fragile time for newly initiated sobriety. And in the 3rd edition of Motivational Interviewing, William Miller and Stephen Rollnick suggest a similar progression called the "MI mountain" in which people move from a state of unreadiness, through a tentative initial period of change, and into a more stable long-term phase if the initial tentative period can be successfully navigated. (In fact, one might suggest that the "MI mountain" is really just the stages of change, but perhaps because of research controversy about Prochaska's model the stages no longer appear in the main motivational interviewing text).

What, then, can be done to improve our success rate with New Year's resolutions? By the time you read this post at the end of January you might already have fallen off the wagon with your resolutions. The average date by which people stop going to the gym after a New-Year's exercise burst is on February 6th -- it's coming up soon! According to Prochaska, the trick may be to make things a little easier on yourself.

In a 1994 article Prochaska identified strong and weak principles for behavior change that suggest a particular sequence: We start doing something new (like a New Year's resolution) because it is important to us. Similarly, Miller and Rollnick suggest that higher importance ratings are the best signal that a change in behavior is about to occur. This is Prochaska's "strong principle" of behavior change. The "weak principle," though, is also needed -- even though we begin doing something new because it is important, life tends to get in the way. The reason we keep doing something new over time is because it is easy. Reducing barriers to the new behavior is key to success over the long term. From the perspective of Two Minds Theory, this is probably because the Narrative mind is satisfied with having made a change, and control of everyday behavior is back in the hands of the Intuitive mind. The Intuitive mind is not particularly affected by importance, it just responds to circumstances. And when circumstances change, voila, we have an abandoned New Year's resolution and an intention-behavior gap.

The trick, then, is to use the initial burst of energy surrounding a new behavior to good effect. When things are important, we are willing to test new approaches and see what works. We should focus those initial efforts on creating a new routine that follows a path of low resistance. It is ease of performing the behavior that will tend to maintain it past the initial burst of change, whether that lasts for 2 weeks, 5 weeks, or 3 months. We should plan now for the point when the Intuitive mind takes over and sustainability of the new behavior is in doubt.