Why New Year’s resolutions fail… and what to do instead, for better health and greater happiness

There's a subtle trap that we unwittingly set for ourselves whenever we formulate a goal. Understanding the nature of this trap is the key to making changes that really stick.

New Year’s resolutions. Some people love them, some hate them; but one thing’s for sure: hardly anyone sticks to them for more than a few weeks. If you made any at all this year, the odds are that you’ve already broken some or even most of them by now.

Yet if you’re like most people, you’re probably unsatisfied with at least some elements of your current life – your health (including your weight), relationships, career trajectory, financial situation, or even elements of your own character.

Why is it that even when we want to change our lives, and even once we’ve acknowledged that if we want change, then we ourselves must do the changing – sorry to burst your bubble but no, that gadget you saw on the TV shopping channel won’t melt fat off your body while you sit on your tush; repeating affirmations won’t make Mr/Ms Right magically manifest; and the probability of you becoming an internet millionaire is vanishingly low – we still have such enormous trouble with making ourselves change in the ways we want to change?

I’ve been wrestling with this question since I was in my late teens. My quest to penetrate the murky swamp of human motivation was initially prompted by witnessing my father’s declining health. He was inexorably drawn into an ever-growing vortex of chronic illnesses which sucked away his quality of life and eventually robbed him of at least 10 years that he should have had. And all of this suffering, as I came to realise through my naturopathic studies, was fuelled by his poor dietary and lifestyle choices.

My Dad was not a highly educated man but he possessed the native intelligence of a born engineer, which he deployed to solve a myriad of technical problems throughout his career and retirement. Yet he seemed powerless to alter his own behaviour in order to save his health, and ultimately his life.

“It’s just the way I’m built; I can’t change who I am,” he would tell me, with a helpless shrug of his shoulders, when I attempted to steer him toward making better dietary choices or reconsidering his lifelong hatred of exercise.

Subsequently, after beginning clinical practice in 1995, I have observed countless iterations of this phenomenon: men and women, young, old and everything in between, who when attempting to solve their health problems, repeatedly crash into the same barrier to change: themselves.

And of course, I’ve smacked up against the same barrier myself, more times than I care to recall.

I’ve explored many different explanations for this strange and frustrating phenomenon – why we find it so hard to change, even when we want to – beginning with classical psychodynamic theories that our childhood experiences set us up for self-defeating behaviour patterns in later life, before roving through Buddhist psychology, cognitive behavioural theories, social learning theory, energy psychology, evolutionary psychology and behavioural genetics.

These disparate ways of understanding human behaviour may be strange bedfellows, but it’s only by delving into each theory and examining the evidence for and against it that I’ve been able to fully grasp the enormity of the task that we face when we attempt to change any of our behaviours, and particularly those that have become habitual.

The integrated understanding of human behaviour that I’ve come to lays out a clear path for optimising our health and happiness, which I use to help my clients achieve their personal goals.

In this article, I’m going to hone in on just one element of this integrated understanding: the fact that our brains have been moulded over evolutionary time to spur us to pursue activities that increase gene survival – that is, the prospect of us finding enough food (and avoiding becoming food for another animal, or being killed by a hostile member of our own species) in order to live long enough to find a suitable mate, have offspring, and take care of them well enough that they survive, find suitable mates, and repeat the process.

Do we consciously make decisions based on these goals of our ‘selfish genes’, as the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins aptly described them? Of course not.

Since the first complex organisms developed, genes have been wiring the neural circuitry of each species to maximise their own survival, by generating feelings of reward or pleasure in an organism’s nervous system when it engages in activities that promote gene survival (finding food, having sex); generating feelings of pain or withdrawal of reward when the organism is confronted with situations that threaten gene survival (starvation, being attacked by a predator or bested by a rival in a sexual display contest in which the prize is mating rights); and developing on-the-spot cost-benefit analysis mechanisms that ensure the organism conserves energy while pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain (pursue the wounded, sick, very young or old prey, not the fit and strong).

In other words, we’re aware of the feelings that our neurological circuits generate when we set, achieve or fail to achieve our goals, but we’re not consciously aware of the underlying gene survival-oriented motivational triad – maximise pleasure, minimise pain, conserve energy – that crafted these circuits over the long sweep of evolutionary time.

So when a woman wonders if she should invest effort in losing weight, or a man contemplates joining a gym in order to build a more muscular physique, neither is thinking to themselves, ‘If I achieve my goal, I will be much more likely to attract a mate of higher genetic quality, and hence our offspring will be advantaged in the mating stakes, and this will maximise the propagation of my genes.’ 

Yet the anticipatory pleasure that we experience when we imagine achieving our goals is an emotion that we are only capable of experiencing because we possess the neural circuitry fashioned by our ‘selfish genes’, which are intent on orchestrating our behaviour in order to ensure their own propagation.¹

Here’s the problem: what’s good for gene survival, isn’t necessarily good for our happiness. To put it bluntly, your genes don’t care whether you’re happy or not; their only ‘motivation’ – if I can use some artistic licence to anthropomorphise strings of nucleotides – is their own perpetuation.

So you may well find that you garner the interest of more physically attractive sexual partners if you lose weight or get buff, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be happier with them; the compatibility that’s required for a successful long-term pairing is far more complex than sexual attraction.

At this stage, you might be wondering what any of this has to do with New Year’s resolutions, or any other attempt at self-improvement.

Concisely put, it’s this: people set goals because they believe that achieving those goals will make them happier, but they’re wrong. Here’s why:

The moods of happiness developed as a guidance system to encourage organisms to pursue gene survival-oriented goals, in the absence of immediate reward.

Happiness, in a sense, is an evolutionary lure to encourage organisms to continue to engage in activities that might ultimately result in the acquisition of food or receptive mates, for which they will be compensated with the sensation of reward, which we might describe in simple terms as pleasure.

Although many people use the terms interchangeably, happiness and pleasure are distinctly different from a neurochemical perspective. Brain circuits that utilise the neurotransmitter serotonin are activated when we feel happy, whereas brain circuits that utilise dopamine light up when we are experiencing the pleasurable sensation of reward.

And most critically, serotonergic circuits are activated by the experience of being deeply engaged in a process which we find personally meaningful. Moreover, the resultant happiness can persist over prolonged stretches of time, whereas dopamine-generated pleasure is an intense but necessarily short-lived experience. The serotonin-inducing relationship-building conversation can go on for hours, but the dopamine-triggering orgasm can’t!  

Have you ever achieved a goal, felt a momentary surge of elation, and then noticed a sense of let-down? Almost everyone has. It’s not because you picked the wrong goal to make you happy, it’s because achieving goals can never make you happy; it’s the process of working toward the goal that generates the experience of happiness.

And what does all this have to do with setting New Year’s resolutions, or any other intention to change your behaviour?

In a nutshell, if you want your intended change to be truly sustainable and life-enhancing, your focus needs to be on the process, not the outcome.

For example, people who manage to lose weight and keep it off permanently find a way to fall in love with the experience of making healthier food choices (process), rather than fixating on the number on the scales (outcome).

People who make exercise a regular part of their lives find a way to fall in love with the experience of moving their bodies (process), rather than fixating on completing a marathon or sculpting a six-pack (outcome).

I have found that most of my clients really struggle with reorienting themselves away from their outcome-focused goals and toward the process. It takes a lot of coaching on my part to wean them from their addiction to goals – which is not surprising, given how rewarding those surges of dopamine are!

But once they really start to grasp it, this reorientation is truly life-transforming. As a client whom I’ll call Natalie (not her real name) wrote,

“I did some journaling and started meditation and being kind to myself and took all the unrealistic expectations off and kept repeating ‘this is for life’. Once that statement sunk in my new lifestyle kicked in. I WANTED to eat well. Crap food just didn’t interest me. I stopped eating my emotions. I got up from the table with food on my plate and instead of telling myself I was wasting food so I had to eat it, it is now ‘I am feeding my compost worms’. I am loving eating from my garden. I am loving getting out into the sunshine and getting up at 5am to get in a walk by myself whilst hubby and kids still asleep and coming home to do some body weight exercises and stretching – this is the BEST way to start the day. I am now starting the day with my cup full so I can in turn give to my family.”

In a nutshell, switching from outcome orientation to process orientation dramatically increases your prospects for feeling happy, more often than you do currently. Remember, we experience happiness while we’re in the process of working towards our goals, not when we achieve them. So if you want more happiness in your life, rework your New Year’s Resolution to lose weight, get fit, be a better parent or spouse, or whatever it may be, into a detailed list of processes that you would need to engage in, in order to achieve that goal. And then pay close attention to how you feel when you engage in those processes, celebrating them for themselves as well as steps along the way to your ultimate goal.

In the words of Tal Ben-Shahar,

“Attaining lasting happiness requires that we enjoy the journey on our way toward a destination we deem valuable. Happiness is not about making it to the peak of the mountain nor is it about climbing aimlessly around the mountain; happiness is the experience of climbing toward the peak.”

For information on my private practice, please visit Empower Total Health. I am a Certified Lifestyle Medicine Practitioner, with an ND, GDCouns, BHSc(Hons) and Fellowship of the Australasian Society of Lifestyle Medicine.

1. Some people feel offended by this evolutionary understanding of the origin and function of emotions. They object that this formulation implies that our feelings are 'fake' - just a false front over the mindless machinations of our genes. Nothing could be further from the truth. As simple unicellular organisms evolved into infinitely more complex beings living more complex social lives, they required a far more complex behavioural repertoire in order to survive and procreate, and this in turn requires a complex emotional life. This is why we see a greater emotional range in mammals than in reptiles.
Human children are, from a developmental point of view, born roughly 12 months premature, and hence require the most extended period of intensive nurturing of any known species. In an evolutionary setting, a child was more likely to make it to reproductive age if he or she had both a maternal figure to provide physical and emotional sustenance, and a paternal figure to provide protection and provisioning. Stable pair-bonding between the mother and father of the child is the best way to achieve this outcome, since each is genetically invested in the survival of their offspring. In order to form stable pair-bonds, we need to be able to experience both romantic love and the sustained devotion which outlasts infatuation. In order to care for helpless infants and challenging toddlers, we need to be able to experience compassion and tolerance. In other words, evolutionary processes built the 'hardware' - the neural circuitry - on which our 'software' - our complex behavioural and emotional repertoire - runs. Your feelings are real, and without which them your life would be meaningless and pointless, but you wouldn't have the capacity to feel them at all if there were no underlying biological processes driving them.