It’s February, and this is when studies say 80% of people quit their New Year’s Resolutions. I wrote this post to help you be in the 20%.

We have three main challenges when it comes to sticking to resolutions.

The Future Self Problem:

The future self problem has been discovered by professor Hal Hershfield through MRI studies of the human brain, which showed that certain areas in the human brain get activated when you think of your current self; however, when you think of a celebrity whom you like but have never met; other brain areas get activated. Interestingly, those same areas light up when you think of yourself in 10 years. We see our future selves as people we’re familiar with and like, but strangers, nevertheless, whom we don’t know or even genuinely care about.

The Temporal Discounting Problem:

The human brain has evolved to prefer instant rewards over future ones as a survival mechanism that served our ancestors well in the wilderness. We learned to place a higher value on the present, so we discount the value and importance of the future. That’s why we stay up late and regret it the second day. The current night self ignores the morning self, putting it in trouble.

These two challenges become prominent when it comes to habits. We keep on making unhealthy choices because the rewards are instantaneous; we feel the dopamine in our bodies when we have a piece of cake or join a group for a cigarette outside. However, the consequences of negative habits are delayed; they happen to someone we don’t care about, our future lookalike. On the other hand, as James Clear explains in Atomic Habits, positive habits are a bit painful in the present; they require us to stretch those muscles, withhold spending money, or experience some discomfort. In contrast, their advantages to our overall well-being are delayed. Accordingly, not seeing the immediate positive impact of new habits, by February, for example, makes us quit our New Year’s resolutions too soon.

Perfectionism:

We quit because we demand of ourselves a 100% that nobody asked of us. We can not tolerate 80% or 60%. It’s the very familiar all-or-nothing mindset, the 100% or 0%, as Jon Acuff shares in Finish. We often think if we hadn’t committed well so far today, or this week, or this month, we might as well forget about the whole thing. We self-sabotage, thereby dismissing any little progress we made. And that’s a trap that we can easily fall into if we are not paying attention.

What should we do to overcome these hurdles?

That’s my post for tomorrow.