Make your New Years Resolution Work

Happy New Year! Have you made New Year’s Resolution for all your adult life and only to forget them even before January is over? Well you are not alone, and the odds are against you as most don’t make it to Valentine’s Day. According to U.S. News, by the second week of February, more than 80% of the resolutions fail.

I am struggling with my weight and after failing at hundreds of diets, mixed martial arts, boot camp and red plates (Apparently makes your brain think, you are full) later, I realized they are all short-term fix. To be successful I need to change my lifestyle by changing the underlying driver which is Habit.

So, this is my findings in my journey and how I plan to go about it after reading the book “The Power of Habits” by Charles Duhigg and complemented by “When” by Daniel H. Pink and “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman.

So, to slay my resolutions, here is how I am going to tackle it this year.

1.  Utilizing the “Fresh Start Effect” by knowing “When”
2.  Mastering the Habit Loop (Cue → Routine → Reward)
3. Plan, Quick win and Keystone Habit

“Fresh Start Effect” by knowing “When”

Why is it that we make resolution on new years day, as the researcher from Wharton found that, the first day of the year is called a “temporal landmark” with “Fresh Start Effect”. Just like physical landmark, we navigate through time with temporal landmark. New Year allows us to start fresh and allow us to disconnect ourselves from our past and give us the opportunity to create new, better selves.

As Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize-winning psychologist, mentions in his book “Thinking Fast and Slow”, such fresh start/new year can slow our thinking, allowing us to look at the big picture to focus on macro goals to make better decisions.

Despite the odds against you, make the resolution, as this is one of the best time to pivot and change your life in the better directions and getting yourself out of inertia.

Mastering the Habit Loop (Cue → Routine → Reward)

Before you make a game plan, you need to understand how new habits are formed and how to re-engineer the old ones. The findings of MIT researchers, summarized by Charles Duhigg, there is “… a simple neurological loop at the core of every habit, a loop that consists of three parts: A cue, a routine and a reward.”

Routine is the simplest to understand, it’s the behavior you want to change, whether it is to eat healthy food, control your portion, drink less, walk every day, spend more time with family.

Now that you have figured that out, next step to identify the reward as that is what is going to make you stick to it. Rewards are powerful because they satisfy cravings like feeling healthy, energetic, being loved by your family or being successful as spouse, parent, child, enterprise or whatever and wherever your passion lies. For me the reward is feeling healthy and energetic enough to keep up with my kids and become successful as a father, husband and son.

With what you want to fix (Routine) and why you want to fix it (Reward), you have to figure out how to initiate/trigger the routine, essentially figure a Cue to get into action. Scientists have made that easy for us, all Cues/Triggers fall into five categories: -

1. Location
2. Time
3. Emotional State
4. Other People
5. Immediately preceding action

Do I overeat at a specific location? Or do I lose control at a particular time at Breakfast or Dinner? Or is my emotional state of being stressed or being tired causes the rummage for comfort food? Or Is it certain people I do that with? Or is it specifically after a long day of meetings weaken my control.

Isolating the Cue is paramount in figure out what to introduce to trigger good habits and what or who to avoid to leave bad habits.

Plan, Quick win and Keystone Habit

The final and most important step now is to have a game plan. My personal philosophy is that you always have plan it’s just as Benjamin Franklin said, "Failing to plan is planning to fail." As Winston Churchill said, “Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential.” The process of planning creates unconscious commitment to the goal along with prepares you with how to deal with situations. As I can bet, things are not going go exactly according to your plan and having gone through a process of planning you might have ideas of alternatives. For example, after a hard day at work, binge on grapes rather than eating fries.

Now the catalyst for success is to be able to have quick wins, you need to identify milestones in getting to your goal. Because lack of a reward for too long will make it that much harder to stick to your tasks. As quick simple wins gives you the sense of accomplishment to stick to your goals and eventually becomes Keystone Habit, which becomes the first step in changing your world. In the actual weight loss the significance of working out is minuscule, "You can't out-workout a bad diet." However, if you consistently work out, your chance of sticking to your diet goes up significantly.

Don’t listen to me listen to Admiral William McRaven, “To change the world start by start off by making your bed every morning.”

To keep myself honest about my steps and movement I even got myself a fitness tracker and also found people in my life who are positive enforcement and checks to bring me back in line.

I got my plan and I am gunning for it. What’s your resolution and what are you doing change to make your life more amazing?

Further Reading:

Fresh Start Effect

How Habits Work

Why 80 Percent of New Year's Resolutions Fail