#24: The Psychology of New Year's Resolutions

We are finally back! Sorry for the delay in getting episodes out—we just moved from New York to Florida and couldn't find the time to podcast. But we are settled in now, and for our first episode of 2021, we decided to tackle the psychology of new year's resolutions.

Why do we make new year's resolutions, and why do so few of us actually keep them? Statistically, 80 percent of people will drop their resolutions by February, and the exercise app Strava has deemed January 19th "Quitter's Day" because of how many people stopped logging their exercise by that date.

But there is value in using the fresh start of a new year to change yourself for the better. It seems to highlight a delicate tension between discipline and hard work on the one hand versus enjoying life in the present and having self-compassion on the other hand. As the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire says: “Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.”

But knowing when to pause and be happy and when to dig in and be disciplined can be difficult, especially because we are so good at lying to ourselves.

So in this episode, we talk through new year's resolutions and where they go wrong. And digging deeper, we also zoom into the psychology of sacrifice and discipline. Making sacrifices in the present in order to have a better future seems obvious, but when we view it through the evolutionary lens it is really quite an amazing discovery.

**Click below to read our blog post that integrates a core concept from meditation with the topic of New Year's resolutions:

• The Power of Begin Again

Timestamps (clickable on webpage):

• [04:20] Our New Year's Resolutions
• [12:50] Yearly question to check in with: What is the meaning of life?
• [18:44] Beautiful Anonymous and the best new year's resolution: making the perfect pancake
• [22:05] The Marshmallow Experiment and how gratitude can help us to foster more discipline.
• [30:24] Jordan Peterson's Bible lectures, Garden of Eden, and the psychology of how humans discovered the future
• [40:55] Cain and Able and the concept of sacrifice
• [52:45] Philosopher Alan Watts on "prickly" people vs "gooey" people
• [56:54] The power of opposites in finding a balance between discipline/sacrifice and compassion/happiness.

Links:

• Manolis Kellis on Lex Fridman Podcast—The Meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything
• The Fruit, the Tree, and the Serpent: Why We See So Well by Lynne A. Isbell
• Beautiful Resolutions for 2021 by Beautiful Anonymous
• Where Gratitude Gets You by NPR's Hidden Brain
• Stanford marshmallow experiment
• Jocko Willinc's videos "Good", Sisyphus, and Discipline