New Years Resolutions and Absolutions

I read somewhere that New Years Resolutions should really be called New Year’s Absolutions – where we forgive ourselves for all our previous weaknesses and start afresh. I love the idea of absolution (that’ll be the ex-Catholic in me emerging) but there seem to me to be some questionable assumptions in there.



The idea, I think, that often seems to float in the back ground here is some sort of moral culpability about things that have gone ‘wrong’ (why else would we need absolution?). It kind of suggests that had we simply done things differently, we might have got what we wanted:

• Not doing as well as you want in school? – not working hard enough! 
• Spending too much money on X? – not enough self-discipline! 
• Eating too much? – show some restraint! 

Underneath all these things seems to be the notion that our problems have a simple solution – self-control; and if we can just master that then life will get dramatically better. Just say no! is the useless advice I was given so many times as a child. Now, nothing wrong with self-control, or saying no, of course, but experience suggests that simple exhortations from others, or simple promises to ourselves, are delusory. And so I have two thoughts about New Years Resolutions

Firstly, we should balance our resolutions with some kindness to ourselves, and some realism about the way the world really is. For example, I went through a phase of always looking at my weight. I’m not sure why this was, as I know I am pretty healthy in this respect. But then, everywhere I look I seem to see fitter, leaner people than me – and I suspect that’s what’s driving this; some unhelpful comparative urge that is more based in vanity than anything else. And of course once I begin to see the world this way, I end up not seeing the vast majority of people who manage perfectly well with normal bodies (and I know it's much worse for women - almost the whole of the advertising industry is designed to make them feel bad about their bodies). So body shape may be one resolution to flush away, and I suspect many others are the same – based in some fantasy notion of ‘better’ that’s as much a product of marketing as anything else. Some things are just fine, and we can accept them.  No absolution needed.

But there are things that are worth striving for - being kinder, being more content, standing up to injustices and so on.  My second thought is on following these aspirations, and that takes me back to self-control. After years of failing on the self-control front, I have come to think that relying on self-control is a mistake, at least in the obvious way. If I had the self-control already, I wouldn't need the resolution. As Brian Resnick writes, if the aim is to eat fewer sweets, and then you find yourself in front of a pile of cookies, [then] the pile of cookies has already won. In other words, the best way to achieve your goals is not to exercise self-control, but to create situations that avoid the need for self-control in the first place.

That’s what Hofmann et al found in a study which asked participants about what desires, temptations, and self-control they were experiencing (using mobile phones to ask at random times across an average week). The findings were surprising; that people who reported themselves as having high levels of self-control reported fewer temptations over the week. That is, the very people who said they excel at self-control seemed least disposed to use it!

So this means that the alternative to the obvious ‘just say no’ self-control is to have the less-obvious self-control to set systems up to avoid temptation in the first place. The simplest examples are familiar:

• setting the alarm on the other side of the room so you have to get out of bed requires a different and easier sort of self-control than saying no I will not go back to sleep 
• ensuring that you shop for food when you are full requires a different and easier sort of self-control than saying no to those cakes when you are hungry. 
• turning off all the notifications on your phone requires a different and easier sort of self-control than ignoring the notifications when they happen 
• switching your phone to black and white requires a different and easier sort of self-control than resisting the designed-to-hook interface on an hourly (minute-ly?) basis
• buying small rather than large plates requires a different and easier sort of self-control than not loading up plates when you are hungry (and has been shown to be very successful) 

But there are probably similar things for even the loftiest of goals:

• want to be kinder? Avoiding scare-mongering news and social media (which are likely to generate anxiety and fear which do not support kindness) requires a different and easier sort of self-control than simply trying to be kind 
• want to be more content? Keeping a daily journal where you track all good things that happen to you requires a different and easier sort of self-control than just telling yourself you should be more grateful for what you have. 
• want to stand up to injustice?  Joining and attending a group of similar minded people requires a different and easier sort of self-control than just hoping you'll have the courage if and when the time come

[This third point is generally valid - surround yourself with the people who are most like the person you would like to be, because we tend to become like the people we spend most time with]

Brian Galla sums it up nicely when he suggests that people who are good at self-control … seem to be structuring their lives in a way to avoid having to make a self-control decision in the first place. Perhaps it's those structures and systems that we should be paying attention to, rather than the resolutions themselves.


References

Galla, B. M., & Duckworth, A. L. (2015). More than resisting temptation: Beneficial habits mediate the relationship between self-control and positive life outcomes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 109(3), 508-525.

Hofmann, W., Baumeister, R. F., Förster, G., & Vohs, K. D. (2012). Everyday temptations: An experience sampling study of desire, conflict, and self-control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102(6), 1318-1335.

Resnick, B (2018) The Myth of Self Control. Vox