On Resolutions

When you are young, the purity of a new diary or calendar felt like a blank slate upon which to reinvent yourself. With each year that passes, the blank slate becomes more and more encrusted with the chalk of the past. The illusion that you could wipe it clean of negative old habits and replace them with positive new ones becomes less and less convincing, yet still you make new year resolutions; you make them because you know that a life without hope is not worth living and that maybe this will be the year where everything will fall into place.

The problem with most resolutions is that people try to do too many; once you start thinking about ways to improve the possibilities are overwhelming, especially when you are jaded by Christmas over-indulgence. If you try to do too much and you will end up doing nothing at all, not in the long-term. To be effective, choose one new habit that you would like to make a part of your life and focus on achieveing that. Life is a long-term project, there is no need to try and do it all at once.

When you make your one resolution, it helps if it is stated in positive terms. A negative injunction — e.g. give up smoking, stop drinking — makes you focus on the thing that you don’t want to do. According to neuroscientists, the unconscious mind doesn’t understand negative injunctions, so when you say “stop smoking”, your unconscious mind sees that it is sacrificing a delectable cigarette. Instead, say you want to “free yourself from smoking”, making it a liberation rather than a sacrifice.

The brain hates cognitive dissonance — contradictory information produces stress, anxiety, and denial. Cognitive dissonance sounds horrible, but it can be also be used to your advantage. If you write about your resolution as if you have achieved it, the brain feels impelled to make it true.

The patron saint of new year’s resolutions is H.G. Wells’ Doctor Moreau. Like the resolution maker, Moreau attempted to extirpate the animality from animals. In Moreau’s case this involves turning pumas, hogs, apes and leopards into passable humans. In the resolution maker’s case, they try to turn themselves into angels and thus, like Moreau, inevitably fail. So, rather than create an unrealistic diet of carrots and porridge for breakfast, you could resolve to eat a bit of fruit in the morning. Just small things that make a difference when they become habitual.

If you haven’t got a particular resolution that you want to keep, why not try an experiment. The bookshelves overflow with other people’s arbitrary resolutions: whether living Biblically for a year, having sex every day for a year, not buying anything for a year. I recently gave up reading for a week, just to see what it was like and how it affected me. In January, I am not going to drink any alcohol, not because I don’t like it or have a problem but just to see how I feel at the end of it and to see if I can discover any particularly interesting teas at Tchai Ovna.

Finally, I would urge you to think of resolutions as cultivation rather than change. No plant would survive being uprooted and completely pruned, but it may prosper if it is watered daily and given adequate sunlight. Accept where and who you are, and know that improvement is always possible.

Resolution Reminders

The purpose of life is to flourish, and to do as well as you can within the context you find yourself in.

What destroys resolutions? Tiredness, disillusion, laziness, distraction. Make sure you get enough sleep!

There is no such thing as failure in a resolution. If you fail, start again.

Be specific. The problem with a resolution like “lose weight” this is that it is not specific enough – neither about the weight that you want to lose or because of the reason that you go that way in the first place. Set a target.

Never make resolutions that are negative.

Never make resolutions that are too difficult.

31 Dec 2009