Sticking to new year’s resolutions and maintaining good habits isn’t always easy but here’s how to improve your chances
Did you make any New Year’s resolutions this year? More to the point, if you did, have you managed to keep them, three weeks into 2023? If you have, then well done, but before you pat yourself on the back, there are a few things that you might want to consider.
New Year’s resolutions aside, more generally, there’s been much discussion among psychologists, life coaches and others about how to help people to achieve their goals. There’s a wealth of advice about how to meet the challenges that we set ourselves, be that getting a new job, becoming fitter or learning a language.
But then what? What happens after you’ve achieved your ambition? Consider the question of weight loss. You’ve finally managed to shed those unsightly pounds? Well done, but you might well find them creeping back. According to recent research published by the American Psychological Association (APA), dieters in a set of studies managed to lose weight in the first nine to 12 months of the trial. However, over the next two to five years, they had gained back all but an average of 2.1 of those pounds. Meanwhile, participants in the non-dieting control groups gained weight during those same years, but an average of just 1.2 pounds.
It’s not the destination – it’s the journey
How do we stick to our resolutions and maintain those good habits? In another study published by the APA, this one entitled, “It’s the journey, not the destination: How metaphor drives growth after goal attainment,” researchers discovered that we’re more likely to maintain these good habits and behaviours if we think less about “arriving at a destination,” and frame the idea instead as one of “completing a journey.”
Developing this idea, the researchers, Szu-Chi Huang and Jennifer Aaker from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, considered how metaphor could help. They conducted a series of six studies involving over 1,600 people from different cultures and sectors. These included executives in Africa, dieters keeping a seven-day food diary and people doing exercise that consisted of a 14-day walking programme among others. In the first experiment, they analysed two groups consisting of more than 400 American students and university staff who had recently achieved a goal – usually related to their academic careers or their fitness.
This group was then subdivided with some participants taking the “destination” approach while others thought of attaining their goal in terms of a journey with a third subset, a control group not using either metaphor. Not only were those who thought of a journey more likely to say that they would stick with the beneficial behaviours that had helped them to achieve their goals, but they actually did so when monitored later.
Sticking to that diet, maintaining those good habits
In another study approximately 250 dieters set themselves a target for daily calorie intake. They then tracked their actual intake. Here too the “journey” group reported that they were more likely to continue their diets. Not only that, but they said that they experienced the idea of personal growth.
In another study participants who followed a two-week walking programme, aiming to clock up 100,000 steps, told researchers that they were encouraged to continue their behaviour after they’d attained their goal, but this was especially during the run up to hitting the 100,000 steps. It seems that in that final, home stretch thinking about a journey emphasises the idea of a goal to be achieved and motivates us even more effectively.
Diet and exercise aside, the African executives who had completed a business course were encouraged to view earning their qualification as either a destination or as a step on a journey. In this case, six months after it had ended, the latter group were still putting into practice what they had learnt from the course.
Huang and Aaker conclude, “These findings demonstrated how shifting people’s focus of a metaphor (i.e., focusing on the journey vs. the destination part of a completed path) can lead to consequentially different perceptions and behaviours.” As we aim to maintain those New Year’s resolutions and, more importantly, to ensure that we’re constantly improving in the areas that are important to us, envisaging ourselves on a journey rather than arriving at a destination can clearly help.
