A Neuroscientist's Advice on New Year's Resolutions

Some say making New Year’s resolutions is pointless. They are wrong. It’s a way our culture helps us harness one of the human brain’s most remarkable capacities: our ability to think about our own thinking. Resolutions remind us to step back from the hurley-burley and ask: Am I pursuing the right goals, and pursuing them in the right ways? Any of us can use the latest neuroscience to improve our thinking about thinking. It can help give us the grit to stick with goal—and the wisdom to adapt (or even quit) if changing our mind is the route to success. Why do we have New Year’s Resolutions? Planning. Whether you play chess or checkers, you know it’s impossible to win only by using habits, reflexes, or emotional responses. In life, planning makes the difference between running straight forward into a barrier, or anticipating that barrier and taking a detour instead. Our clever human brains can look ahead—through a decision tree that branches out into many potential futures—to pick the best option. Such planning is a huge challenge: board games are simpler than much of real life, yet even a relatively simple game like “Go” has over ten170 possible positions (that’s 1 followed by 170 zeros). An adult’s brain can do wonderous things. But because it runs on around 20 watts of power (enough for a dim incandescent light bulb), it must use clever shortcuts. And understanding them can help us plan better. One shortcut your brain takes is “chunking,” or clustering multiple actions together into an option that can be evaluated as one. Think of learning how to drive a car. Initially each component requires conscious thought, as one step might involve thousands of muscle movements. But over time, each becomes routine. Second nature. Your brain is making plans, and in a hierarchical way, with goals made up of subgoals, each comprised of more subgoals, and so on. That’s why it helps to break your New Year’s goal into manageable parts. And to remind yourself, deep in February, not to despair if you haven’t completely “learned French” yet. Another of your brain’s shortcuts is creating menus of possible options (neuroscientists call them “affordances”) to narrow down the infinite actions you could take. For example, sitting here at my desk I could burst into song, eat my computer mouse, or buy bagpipes online. What I’m actually considering, however, is typing or getting coffee. There are times, however, when we must step back and actively search for new options, even, or maybe especially, in seemingly insoluble situations. A famous story has Prime Minister Winston Churchill taking a moment to think while he shaved one morning, during Britain’s darkest hours of World War II in 1940, when he suddenly said “I think I see my way through.” His idea—”drag the United States in”–was not small. But in everyday life you can also actively step back—perhaps on your own, or with a friend or mentor—to think of options outside your usual menu. Indeed, some of the most important options we need to recognize include changing our mind, changing our goals, and even quitting things we care about. After all life involves balancing family, work, health, friends… Churchill often changed his mind during the war, and was willing to be argued out of his ideas like sending troops to liberate Norway in 1942. Perseverance is important, but too stubbornly sticking to initial goals can be harmful. People who are able to quit in an effective way—by abandoning goals that no longer work and finding new ones that work better—tend to be more content with their lives, less anxious, and have decreased stress hormones. “Everyone has a plan,” as the boxer Mike Tyson observed, “’till they get punched in the mouth.” To help persevere through inevitable failures and setbacks, ask yourself questions like “What can I do to help myself?” or “Is there a way to do this even better?” Keeping your New Year’s Resolution may well involve creatively adapting how you achieve it, over the year.