As we prepare to welcome the New Year, many of us plan to use it as an opportunity to start a new life. A friend mentioned he would like to spend the last week of 2024 developing New Year resolutions. The uppermost resolutions in his mind are walking 10,000 steps, doing yoga, reducing screen time, reading books every day, and quitting smoking, meat, dairy, and alcohol. I am sure he will succeed in drafting these resolutions well. However, I doubt whether he would succeed in implementing them.
There is a reason why I doubt his ability to follow through on his resolutions.
According to Dr Edward D. Miller, dean of medical school and CEO at Johns Hopkins University, 6,00,000 bypass surgeries and 1.3 million angioplasties are carried out annually in the US, costing the country $30 billion. Unless the outgoing patients don’t change their lifestyles, in 50% of cases, their arteries will get clogged again, and they will need to undergo repeat surgeries after a few years. In the case of angioplasties, it may take just a few months instead of a few years. For this reason, the outgoing patients are interviewed and counseled before being released from the hospital. They are asked whether they would like to change their lifestyle or won’t mind coming for a repeat surgery. Dr Miller says he has not encountered any outgoing patients who think they would like to come for a repeat surgery. All assert their resolve to go for the prescribed lifestyle changes. However, when researchers tracked the same patients for two years, they discovered that 90% had returned to their earlier lifestyles- the way a stretched rubber band does when released.
When the impending death cannot frighten and motivate humans to make the required change, what else will?
Perhaps nothing.
However, though it is tempting to assume so, it would be a mistake to believe that these 90% of patients fail to make the necessary lifestyle changes solely because of their weak intentions, motivation, or willpower. These are essential but insufficient to implement our commitments.
The idea is to identify and reduce the intensity of forces that hinder the change and increase the intensity of forces that support the change. Once we have identified these forces, we can weaken or bolster them by associating and feeling pain with the former and joy with the latter,
When we realize that we must make a change, the intention is often at an intellectual level; it is what our rational brain wants to do. This rational part of the brain is like the rider-in-command that must enlist the support of the elephant it rides to get anything done. This ‘rational’, ‘commander,’ or the ‘rider’ part of the brain resides in the prefrontal cortex just behind our foreheads. The elephant it rides is the brain’s ‘implementor’ or ‘doer’ part of the brain called the parietal cortex. It is located below the top of the head. Whereas our intentions stem from the prefrontal cortex, our programmed reactions and responses come from the latter.
If the ‘rider’ wants to get anything done, it must program its ‘elephant’ to respond to an environmental ‘cue’ in the proposed way. The ‘cue’ is like the path that invites, encourages, and guides the elephant to walk towards and along it. So, any change in habit requires creating a strong alignment between the rider (the intention), the elephant (the doer or implementor), and the cue (the path).
Here are 10 power-packed strategies based on neuroscience to strengthen and align your rider, elephant, and cues to maximize your chances of implementing your New Year resolutions (or any other change you want to bring at any point in life).
1. Speak to the ‘elephant’ (doer) in its language, not yours.
Introduce your intention to your elephant in an ‘If/When…Then’ language it can understand. For example, when I have brushed my teeth…then I go out, spread my yoga mat, and do my daily yoga exercises. Another example: If, at any point in time, I find myself thinking something negative, I start observing my inhalations and exhalations and ensure that I complete each of these without thought. Here, what you write or speak after ‘If/When’ is the cue (a venue, time, or a situation), and what follows ‘Then’ is the specific action with which you want your elephant to respond to it.
2. Let the truck push or tow the car.
Trucks are robust habits you never miss (e.g., brushing your teeth in the morning), and cars are the intentions or weak habits whose engines have gone kaput and cannot run independently. Cars, therefore, must be pushed or towed by the trucks. So, find a truck- an activity you do daily and use it as a cue. Make a rule that you cannot do your ‘truck’ unless you do your ‘car.’ The itch to do the ‘truck,’ because it is a strong habit, will compel you to do the ‘car’ so that you can do the ‘truck’ you are itching for. Sometimes, when you cannot or don’t want to put the car before the truck (you do not want to do yoga before brushing your teeth), use the truck as a cue to tow (remind you of) the new, proposed activity to follow it with.
3. Program your elephant by frequently imagining, feeling, and thinking about the new activity.
The idea is to identify and reduce the intensity of forces that hinder the change and increase the intensity of forces that support the change. Once we have identified these forces, we can attenuate or bolster them by associating and feeling pain with the former and joy with the latter, as suggested below:
- Imagine: Close your eyes to imagine the earmarked environmental cue (you have just taken a bath). Now, visualize yourself following this activity with the proposed new activity you want to develop as a habit (sitting in a cross-legged posture and starting your meditation). While visualizing, take care that you don’t visualize achieving the end goal (losing 5 kg by March 31, 2025). Instead, visualize overcoming obstacles and being able to do what you have committed to do (30-minute aerobics). This is so because constantly visualizing the achievement of our end goal reduces, at the unconscious level, the perceived gap between where we are and where we want to be. Consequently, this drains the energy needed out of our ambition.
- Feel: Reinforce the above imagination by associating it with intense pleasure and pride of achievement (feel these intensely in every cell of your body). When you want to give up something, associate lots of pain with it.
- Think: Tell yourself a powerful reason for doing so (I will do 30 minutes of aerobics daily because I don’t want to see myself in a hospital in my old age. I want to feel young and energetic even in my old age.)
Repeat this imagination, feeling, and thought with high-definition clarity, invincible conviction, and high-intensity feeling many times during the day. Do it whenever you are reminded of it: in the toilet, waiting at traffic signals, or in a grocery store queue. Keep doing this over a prolonged period.
Remember that willpower is a finite resource, so use it to a minimum. Instead of using their willpower, successful people restrict the availability of choices. It is not a good idea to bring sweets home and then exercise your willpower to overcome the temptation not to eat them.
4. Build strong cue-response associations.
The human brain remembers any experience by tagging it with the environmental cues involved: places, people, happenings, things, time, thoughts, and associated emotions. So, our unconscious mind ties any activity we perform to these accompanying cues. In the future, because of this association between cues and action, the latter becomes our preferred behavior whenever our unconscious mind notices the presence of any associated cues.
We reinforce this cue-reaction association every time we respond to the same cues with the same reaction and weaken it when we disrupt the pattern. Whatever becomes a deep-rooted habit also becomes unconscious. It is due to these cue-response repetitions that scrolling becomes an automatic and unconscious behavior when you hold a smartphone in your hand.
5. Develop mental toughness.
Mental toughness involves mental preparation, exercising the ‘no option’ rule, and practicing postponing gratification.
- Mental preparation. If you are doing something else these days during the time slot you want to use for the proposed new activity, imagine all the temptations, pulls, and other obstacles that would not let you do this new activity. Having done so, estimate the mental effort required to overcome these obstacles and build strategies to handle them. When you mentally prepare yourself to deal with the size of the challenge, it works like a vaccine. You are developing psychological antibodies to deal with it.
- Exercising a ‘no option’ rule implies you do not give yourself the option to do any other activity in the time slot you have slated to do the new activity despite all provocations, temptations, and difficulties. It is like putting a tree guard around a weak baby plant. So, before you plan your ‘To Do’ list, plan your ‘Not to Do’ list (the non-productive or undesirable activities you are in the habit of doing). You will make space for the former if you strictly follow the latter.
- Practise postponing or delaying gratification. Instead of doing what you feel tempted to do now, practice choosing what will help you achieve what you want the most in the long term. Observe for a few days what you do in the time slot instead of how you want to use it and apply the ‘no option’ rule.
6. Invent deterrents and enablers.
Environmental deterrents protect you from doing the old activity, and enablers make it easier for you to do your proposed new activity. Suppose the old activity is watching Netflix after dinner, and you want to replace it with a new habit of reading. Carry a book to the dining table to remind yourself that you must read it after dinner and set your reading goals for the after-dinner reading session (enabler). Don’t switch on the TV during or after dinner or afterward (deterrent). What you don’t want to do, don’t start. After dinner, go to a different room, without your smartphone, where you propose reading something daily (enabler). Some may go to the extent of not renewing your Netflix subscription (a powerful deterrent).
Remember that since willpower is a finite resource, we must use it to a minimum. Instead of using their willpower, successful people restrict the availability of choices. It is not a wise idea to bring sweets and cakes home and then exercise your willpower to overcome the temptation not to eat them. It takes less willpower to return home without visiting the confectionary shop than to bring sweets home and fight against the temptations throughout the day. It is easier not to start eating potato chips than to stop it somewhere in the middle.
Before you plan your ‘To Do’ list, plan your ‘Not to Do’ list – the non-productive or undesirable activities you are in the habit of doing). You will make space for the former if you strictly follow the latter.
7. Break down any big-sized change into smaller chunks.
Sometimes, people feel challenged and hence discouraged by the size of the big goal. So, instead of saying that you will write a 365-page book, set the goal of writing one page daily.
8. Never set more than two ‘change’ goals in one go.
When the sun’s rays are scattered all around, they don’t have the power to burn, but when you use a magnifying lens to focus them at one point, they can burn the paper. Similarly, the more ‘change’ goals we seek to initiate, the less energy and focus are available to each.
9. Review at regular intervals.
Keep a journal to record the days you could not implement your resolutions, and never miss them on two consecutive days. Review your progress at regular intervals, identify your reasons for performance gaps, and invent strategies to address these reasons to improve your performance.
10. Keep your resolutions a secret.
Unless you have a friend whom you value and can share your resolutions with, who will come to know if you lie about your progress, keep your resolutions a secret. Even when you share your resolutions, please share what you commit to doing daily, but never the end goal you hope to achieve in its wake.
With the above 10 strategies, I am sure you can maximize your chances of turning your resolutions into deep-rooted habits.
I wish you good health, peace, prosperity, and meaning in 2025.
Start your journey to lasting habits today. Share your resolutions and progress in the comments!
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