The wheel of time turns once more and we find ourselves in another New Year, full of possibilities and, of course, New Year’s resolutions. Though we make these commitments to change and to create new habits, very often we find it hard to see it all the way through. So how do we make change stick. Katy Milkman is an American economist who studies how economics and psychology can be used to change behaviour. She is also the author of the book How to Change. So what are her recommendations.
The big thing to understand at the start, is that you need to address your mind set. Treat change as a chronic challenge not an acute one. What I mean by this is know that seeing a behavioural change through is not going to be a quick fix. It will require consistent effort and dedication. Habits are behaviours or routines that we’ve repeated, consciously or unconsciously so many times that they become automatic. Creating new habits will require a similar amount of repetition. When we make a decision to change we often overestimate the strength of our own self-discipline. This is because we assume that we can easily combat our own laziness, procrastination, and forgetfulness. But they are tougher adversaries than we imagine. Humans like instant gratification, and doing the right thing is usually unsatisfying in the short term. Turning off the alarm and staying in a cozy bed is much more appealing than going out in the dark and the cold on a January morning for a run. We know it will be uncomfortable, to say the least. And when we discover that we don’t see any immediate gains either, we feel disheartened. So what can we do to overcome our own inertia. All of the suggestions below are from Milkman’s research and are backed up by behavioural studies. But understand that they don’t all work with everyone, you will have to find the ones that work for you.
Make your new habit fun. If exercise is your thing, then buy gym/running kit that you like and want to wear. Can you use music to filter out any perceived monotony. Can you make a game out of what you do. Maybe beating times you’ve set before. When I started going to the gym, I use to make a game out of seeing if I could stop my stopwatch on my phone as near to 60 seconds as possible when I was resting between sets. To be honest it wasn’t the most exciting game I have ever played, but it did help a little. Companies often make games out of training exercises or sales targets. When I worked in a travel business, once a quarter the managers would compete against the staff on the phones to see who could sell the most holidays. One point that Milkman makes on this, is that if you are doing gamification, as it’s called, you need to make sure that everyone is bought into the game. Or that everyone has entered the ‘magic circle’, as it is known.
Another idea from How to Change is to impose constraints upon yourself. This could be self-imposed restrictions until after you have completed the activity. Think about it as a small reward for doing the right thing. You could make it more severe by paying a small fine every time you didn’t do what you were supposed to do. Like paying a friend £1 every time you missed a gym session. This is what Katy Milkman refers to as hard commitments. But you can also make soft commitments by saying, maybe to others, what you are intending to do. So if you didn’t do it you are then faced with the psychological discomfort of admitting your failure.
Use memory joggers to remind you to do what you want to do. This would be like laying out your gym kit the night before. To help me get into the habit of going to the gym in the morning before work, I would pack my gym kit the night before. Everything was then ready for me to just get up and go. It was harder not to go, because I would have to unpack my clothes. Also, as I did, I knew I was letting down the me that had wanted to go the night before.
Another thing Katy Milkman mentions in How to Change, is giving advice to other people. We create a fair amount of cognitive dissonance telling others what they should do, and then not doing the very same thing ourselves. As well as advancing years and general unfitness, this was one of the things that prompted me to exercise regularly. I was being asked on trainings what to do to get fit, and I was telling people but not doing it myself.
A couple of final thoughts is to give yourself a few passes each week/month. This would be allowing yourself to miss a few gym sessions a week/month. So that you know if you really don’t feel up to it that day, then it’s okay not to go. What this also does is it makes you not flake out as much at the start of a week or month, because you know you only have limited passes available. My weekly exercise routine is front loaded. I aim for 5 days out of 7 doing some form of exercise, but my routine has something planned on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. That way I have already got several workouts in the bag by the middle of the week. This then means that I only need to do 2 more days out of 4 to hit 5 days for the week.
Fresh starts do work. Many women give up smoking when they get pregnant. People often make a life change after a significant event, an illness, a death, or a job change. But we can make fresh starts anytime we choose to, like a birthday, or the start of spring or autumn. This is why New Year’s resolutions are so popular, because it is a natural fresh start. If you do really want to change something, make a commitment and then just keep going, you can do it.
“It is the set of the sails, not the direction of the wind that determines which way we will go.” Jim Rohn
