5 New Year Resolutions You Should Never Make—Based On Science

A few days ago you probably made some resolutions about the upcoming year. But now it’s time for a quick audit. According to behavioral science, several of these promises to yourself might be unhelpful, or even harmful, professionally and psychologically.

For example, recent surveys suggest resolutions for 2021 can be grouped into at least 10, broad topic areas, including: Getting more exercise, Losing weight, Organizing one’s life, Learning a new skill, Living life with more job, Saving money/spending less, Quitting smoking, spending time with family and friends, vacationing more and reading more.

Looked at objectively, none of these broad resolution areas are necessarily bad. However, within them, there might be some specific resolutions we want to avoid. Losing 10 lbs., for example, might be much safer and more plausible than losing 100, just as spending too much time with the family could come at the cost of one’s job. In other words, behavioral science tells us it’s all in how we think about our resolutions.

Thus, here are 5 New Year resolutions you should never make:

1. Adopting a new way of ‘doing’ instead of a new way of ‘thinking’. Research suggests most New Year resolutions are health-related. We vow to quit smoking, eat better or exercise more. But the challenge with making such ‘activity’ based resolutions is that they can easily be short-circuited by what comes first: how we think about them. In other words, if we’re not thinking about the benefits of a resolution, we’re less likely to act on it. Brain scientists have found one powerful way to establish and maintain thoughts that lead to action is to mentally visualize what you’re aiming to achieve.
2. Avoiding a bad habit instead of adopting a good one. There’s a reason we take on bad habits and it’s usually because we enjoy them. So when we make resolutions that require getting rid of something we enjoy, it’s natural for our efforts to be half-hearted or short-lived. A more effective approach is to consider a good habit that neutralizes or even substitutes for the bad one. Take smoking, for example. The average American takes 1 hour and 20 minutes per work day in smoking breaks. Compare that to the 3 hour length of an average Udemy course. In other words, one enjoyable activity that will get your mind off work and help you grow is to spend each 20 minute break watching a course segment and learning a new skill.
3. Any resolution that requires too much concentration. Concentration takes energy and, by definition, conscious effort. Obviously, some level of concentration is required to do anything. Yet, if vowing to lose weight, for example, requires a complicated dieting regime, you’re likely to get mentally exhausted in pursuing it. Instead, aim for simplicity. That’s often achieved by simply remembering one simple step. For example, adopting a good habit (Point 1) requires making a small adjustment to routine. That adjustment needs to require small amounts of mental effort or that will add to the “cost” you feel in making the resolution. That makes it onerous. In other words, “reading more” shouldn’t mean spending a fortune on a reader, but perhaps cutting down on some work.
4. To avoid pain. Just because we take a challenging problem off our list doesn't mean it disappears. For example, if you have a work colleague or boss who’s difficult, a resolution that requires avoiding them means avoiding pain. But since, within a work context, that could be both impossible and even detrimental, your subconscious will keep seeing it as something you’ve left unaddressed. The stress and anxiety will build up and cause you real problems. At the same time, your conviction to tour resolution may lead you to ignore what you’re feeling. In the end, you put yourself into poorer state than if you found a way to address the problem. In other words: make your resolution to directly face the painful situation or person, not avoid it or them.
5. Anything that involves you listening less and talking more. There are lots of bad therapists out there and, among them, are the types who like to offer consolation rather than treatment. A common mantra in that camp is to convince people to reaffirm themselves, go with their intuitive feelings or trust their guts. The problem is that our feelings are almost always wrong. We human beings are neither computers nor perfect. As a result, we often let emotion, recent experiences, relationships, physical fatigue or even a poor diet, influence our thinking. The collective of these factors does not let us thinking clearly. The one way to help ourselves, however, is to talk to people who genuinely care and who can give us real—often tough—feedback. That often sets us on the right track and can even help us in tackling our other resolutions.

In principle, New Year’s resolutions are great promises that we make to ourselves. The measuring stick should be that they aim to realistically improve us, but reflect a knowledge of ourselves. Thus, if we follow the crowd and go after someone else’s resolutions or set goals or targets we know we lack the capacity to keep, things can fall apart even before the year gets started.