You're Doing Resolutions Wrong. Here's How to Fix It. | Dr. Laurie Santos
Dr. Laurie Santos, a Yale psychology professor and host of The Happiness Lab, discusses why most New Year's resolutions fail. She explains common psychological pitfalls and emphasizes self-compassion as a powerful "uber-habit" for achieving lasting change and well-being.
Deep Dive Analysis
16 Topic Outline
Introduction to New Year's Resolutions and Dr. Laurie Santos
The 'Fresh Start Effect' and Why Resolutions Are Made
Why Most New Year's Resolutions Fail
Shifting from Circumstantial to Mindset-Based Resolutions
Self-Compassion as an 'Uber Resolution' for Habit Change
Cultural and Psychological Barriers to Self-Compassion
The Challenging Nature of Cultivating Self-Compassion
Applying Self-Compassion to Eating Habits (Mindful/Intuitive Eating)
The 'White Bear Experiment' and Behavioral Control
A Compassionate Approach to Exercise and Movement
Money, Happiness, and the Pitfalls of Financial Resolutions
Hedonic Adaptation and the Dissatisfaction of Wealth
Grieving Limited Possibilities and Negativity in the New Year
Self-Compassion as a Cure for Procrastination
Addressing Concerns about Self-Love and Ego
Self-Compassion's Impact on Helping Others and Preventing Burnout
8 Key Concepts
Fresh Start Effect
Natural temporal breaks (like New Year's Day, Monday mornings, birthdays) can increase motivation, making them opportune times for setting new goals.
Hedonic Adaptation
The tendency for humans to quickly get used to positive changes in circumstances (like a perfect body or higher salary), causing the initial happiness boost to fade over time.
Self-Compassion
A practice of treating oneself with kindness, understanding, and warmth, especially during times of suffering or failure, which research shows can lead to healthier habits, increased resilience, and reduced procrastination.
Willpower
Often seen as the primary way to change behavior, but behavioral science suggests it's unreliable, failing when motivation is low or circumstances become difficult.
Intuitive Eating
An approach to eating focused on listening to your body's signals of hunger and fullness, and choosing foods that make you feel good, rather than following strict diet rules.
White Bear Experiments
Studies demonstrating that trying *not* to think about something often leads to thinking about it more, because the mind needs to represent the forbidden thought to suppress it.
Negativity Bias
The mind's tendency to focus on negative information or aspects that make oneself or the world seem worse, often leading to unhelpful comparisons.
Growth Mindset
The belief that one's abilities and intelligence can be developed through dedication and hard work, which is fostered by self-compassion when facing failure.
11 Questions Answered
People often make New Year's resolutions due to the 'fresh start effect,' where natural temporal breaks like New Year's Day increase motivation and create a sense of a 'blank slate' for personal change.
A high percentage of resolutions fail (90-95%) because people often pick the wrong goals, driven by optimistic bias and misconceptions about what truly brings happiness, focusing on external circumstances rather than internal mindset shifts.
Resolutions focused on changing mindsets, such as cultivating presence, gratitude, or compassion, are more impactful for long-term well-being than those aiming to alter external circumstances like body image or financial status, which often fall prey to hedonic adaptation.
Self-compassion acts as an 'uber resolution' because boosting it naturally leads to healthier habits, increased exercise, reduced procrastination, and greater resilience, making it easier to pursue and stick with other positive changes.
Many find self-compassion challenging because it can feel weak, cheesy, or self-indulgent, clashing with cultural norms that often prioritize a 'stiff upper lip' or self-shame as motivators for improvement.
Self-compassion is not about ego or vanity; it is the basic capacity to care for oneself with warmth and understanding, especially during suffering, which paradoxically makes one more available and compassionate towards others.
Self-compassion addresses procrastination, which often stems from a fear of failure and negative self-talk, by fostering a mindset where mistakes are accepted, thereby reducing the anxiety of starting difficult tasks.
A compassionate approach to eating involves practicing 'mindful' or 'intuitive eating,' which means listening to your body's signals of hunger and fullness and choosing foods that genuinely make you feel good, rather than adhering to restrictive diets.
The most effective way to approach exercise is to choose activities that feel kind and enjoyable for your body, rather than adopting a harsh, 'military' approach, as this fosters greater adherence and makes movement a more sustainable and positive experience.
While more money can help if one is struggling financially, beyond a middle-class income, the research suggests that continuously seeking more money does not lead to lasting happiness due to hedonic adaptation, as people quickly get used to new wealth and still desire more.
No, practicing self-compassion is not selfish; it's like building a muscle that, when strengthened, allows individuals to protect their own boundaries and energy, ultimately making them more capable and less depleted when helping others.
19 Actionable Insights
1. Cultivate Self-Compassion for Habits
Prioritize developing self-compassion because research shows it’s much more effective than shame for motivating healthy habits and acts as an ‘uber habit’ from which other positive changes can flow.
2. Prioritize Mindset & Behavior Shifts
Focus resolutions on changing mindsets and behaviors, such as becoming more present, grateful, or compassionate, rather than solely on external circumstances like body size or salary, as these have a more lasting impact on well-being.
3. Self-Compassion Aids Goal Achievement
Boosting self-compassion can naturally lead to healthier eating, increased physical activity, reduced procrastination, and greater persistence in difficult projects, making it easier to achieve other resolutions.
4. Self-Compassion Builds Resilience
Practice self-compassion to foster resilience and a growth mindset, as it helps overcome the fear of failure and reduces procrastination and imposter syndrome by making you more accepting of mistakes.
5. Combat Procrastination with Kindness
Address procrastination by adopting a self-compassionate approach, which reduces the fear of failure and the negative self-talk associated with mistakes, making it easier to start and persist with difficult tasks.
6. Utilize Fresh Start Effect
Leverage natural temporal breaks like New Year’s Day, Monday mornings, or birthdays, as these are times when motivation is naturally higher, making it easier to initiate new goals.
7. Adopt Mindful Eating Practices
Instead of strict dieting, engage in mindful eating by compassionately choosing foods that make your body feel good, focusing on nourishment rather than changing appearance.
8. Practice Intuitive Eating
Listen to your body’s signals and eat what feels good and nourishing, stopping when full, rather than adhering to rigid diet rules or external statistics.
9. Exercise with Compassion
Approach exercise by asking what kind of movement would feel kind to your body, choosing activities that are enjoyable and beneficial rather than adopting a harsh, military-style regimen.
10. Tailor Exercise to Body’s Needs
Pay attention to your body’s signals to determine the type of exercise needed, whether it’s a gentle, restorative practice or a more intense workout, to ensure it feels good and is effective.
11. Integrate Social & Nature Exercise
Enhance exercise enjoyment and motivation by engaging in activities with others (e.g., online classes, socially distanced hikes) or by exercising outdoors in nature.
12. Don’t Obsess Over Deprivation
Avoid telling your brain not to do something (e.g., ’no cookies’), as this often leads to obsession with the forbidden item; instead, focus on positive, kind choices for your body.
13. Re-evaluate Financial Happiness Goals
Prioritize financial goals like building an emergency nest egg or addressing poverty, but recognize that for those in stable middle-class incomes, more money does not necessarily lead to greater happiness due to hedonic adaptation.
14. Manage Craving with Gratitude
Counter the natural human tendency to constantly crave more by practicing gratitude for what you already possess and using techniques like meditation to control and accept cravings rather than endlessly pursuing more.
15. Allow Space for Grieving
Give yourself permission to grieve and process negative emotions, especially after challenging periods, rather than expecting only positivity, as this is crucial for mental well-being.
16. Self-Compassion Isn’t Ego
Understand that self-compassion is about cultivating basic warmth and care for yourself, not about ego, vanity, or self-aggrandizement, and it involves being okay with your own suffering.
17. Self-Compassion Improves Relationships
Practicing self-compassion frees up mental energy from self-criticism, making you more available and present for others, which can lead to happier and stronger relationships.
18. Self-Compassion Fuels Giving
Recognize that self-compassion is not selfish; by protecting your own boundaries and being kind to yourself, you prevent depletion and have more energy and capacity to give back to others.
19. Develop Universal Compassion Muscle
View compassion as a universal muscle that strengthens with practice, whether directed at yourself or others, leading to an enhanced ability to soothe and be compassionate in all your relationships.
9 Key Quotes
The problem is that people tend to do them wrong. And so the key is we have to pick good resolutions.
Laurie Santos
The failure rate is pretty high. Like I've seen estimates as high as 90%, 95% of new year's resolutions don't stick.
Laurie Santos
We're much better off doing changes that really reflect new mindsets, new behaviors, right? Rather than just kind of change the way our body looks or what our bank account looks like.
Laurie Santos
Willpower just doesn't work when we really need it to. Like, willpower might work when our motivation is high and everything's great, but it falls apart as soon as things get tough.
Laurie Santos
One of the easiest ways to get your mind obsessed with something is to try to tell it not to do something.
Laurie Santos
It's not just that you don't get there. Like it's, you get more money, you want more, right? The ratio between what you have and what you think you need actually gets more off as you earn more, right?
Laurie Santos
We should do unto ourselves the way we're constantly doing unto others. Soothing them, being nice to them, giving them the benefit of the doubt, telling them they're human, right?
Laurie Santos
If we don't have that much airtime caught up in beating ourselves up, it's amazing what we could do with the rest of that airtime.
Laurie Santos
If you practice self-compassion on yourself, your brain doesn't know that that compassion is for you. You just get really good at soothing. And that means you've kind of built up this wonderful skill for, you know, soothing your colleagues at work, soothing your spouse, soothing your kids, being compassionate with somebody who's kind of hard to relate to. You kind of get the other compassion for free.
Laurie Santos
1 Protocols
Loving-Kindness Meditation Practice
Laurie Santos- Extend loving-kindness to people who are easy to love, such as a child or a pet.
- Extend loving-kindness to someone who is harder to love, which can include yourself.