Sticking to New Year's Resolutions

New Year Introduction

0:00Hello and welcome to Everything's Psychology. Happy New Year! Don't you think that January the 1st is a contradictory type of day? Having gratefully received the latest wearable fitness gadgetry, jogging gear and cycling accessories for Christmas, we spend the first day of the new year suffering from the excesses of the previous night, while repeatedly stuffing chocolates, biscuits and cakes into our face.

0:32Hey look, I'm not judging. Well, it'd be wasteful not to. And once it's gone, then we'll start our new routine and of course we'll stick to our new year's resolutions. And this year will be different, won't it? We're going to stick to our self-improvement dreams and we're going to become the better person we know is buried beneath all of those quality street wrappers.

0:57Then along comes January the 17th. This day has been designated as National Quitters Day. It's statistically the day most people quit their resolutions and slump back into their previous habits and routines. So how are you doing so far this year? Whether you're a sticker or a quitter, a basic understanding of psychology can help.

Behaviourist Approach

1:24In this episode, I'm going to take a look at how a behaviourist psychologist would approach New Year's resolutions and I'm going to share some simple techniques that could help you stick to yours. I got the idea to talk about this when I was writing the foreword to a new edition of a book this year by Professor Robert Epstein. The book is called Self-Help Without the Hype. It was originally written in 1996 and I'd heard about it after reading an article by Robert Epstein

1:58describing how eminent behaviourist B.F. Skinner was a remarkably productive, creative and happy individual in large part because of his expertise in self-management. Epstein readily admits that Skinner's views on much of psychology have been overtaken through time but the extraordinary success Skinner had in applying self-management principles to his life should inspire us to take a closer look at the potential value such principles may have for our own.

2:34In Self-Help Without the Hype, Epstein presents three principles for promoting self-management and makes it clear that nothing about self-control relies on willpower. Here's a quote from the introduction of the book. First, self-management techniques have been empirically tested. They work. I am not relaying folk wisdom, common sense or my personal credo. I am conveying, in allegorical form, a body of basic and applied research in the behavioural sciences.

3:12Second, self-management is practical and straightforward. You needn't change attitudes or beliefs or personality to be good at self-management. No willpower is required. No mysterious psychic entities are involved. Self-management involves fundamental skills that anyone can master. Having worked alongside B.F. Skinner for over five years in his own home,

3:45Epstein got to see how self-management was not just an academic topic for Fred. Fred being his name for B.F. Skinner because his full name was Burrhouse Frederick Skinner. Instead, it was a lifestyle where he managed his behaviour constantly. The following example shows how this attitude started young in Skinner. The clothes closet in my room was near the door, and in it I'd fastened a hook on the end of a string,

4:16which passed over a nail along the wall to the nail above the centre of the door. A sign reading, Hang up your pyjamas, hung at the other end. When the pyjamas were in place, the sign was up and out of the way. But when I took them off the hook at night, the sign dropped to the middle of the door where I would bump into it on my way out.

4:41That was a quote from Skinner's autobiography from 1976.

4:46A more common example of the same technique is when we stick a post-it note to the back of the door in the evening, reminding us to take our lunch as we leave for work the next morning. Importantly, nothing about this relies on willpower. The power of behaviourist techniques come from the acceptance of personal mediocrity. Now, this may sound harsh, but the first lesson to becoming a better self-manager is to know that you're not naturally a great self-manager.

5:19Once you acknowledge this universal truth, you're better armed to design and adopt a system that aligns with how you act and behave.

5:30Here's a quote from Self-Help Without the Hype by Robert Epstein. If you master the three simple skills presented in this book, you will be able to tackle virtually any kind of problem. Dieting, getting organised, becoming more creative, and coping with stress are just special cases of self-management.

5:55Epstein's book relays three simple principles which are very easy to remember as they all start with the letter M. And I'm going to go over them one by one now so you get the tips and see how they can relate to your life and your New Year's resolutions.

Modify Environment

6:12Modify your environment. The first principle is to stop looking within yourself and instead look around you to make changes. For example, if you want to stop eating so much sugar, move the sugar bowl away from the kettle. Move it to the garage or upstairs, for instance. If you want to start jogging, move your trainers and your jogging gear into your line of sight as soon as you wake up. And if you want to eat more green vegetables,

6:44move them out of that little hidden drawer at the bottom of the refrigerator and promote them to be at eye level. And whilst you're at it, move all those fizzy drinks out and relegate them to the garage alongside the sugar. In a moment of strength, change your environment to make it harder to perform the behaviours you want to stop and easier to promote those you wish to adopt. Sometimes this principle is adopted as regulation for extreme cases, such as smoking.

7:17Tobacco smoking is a learned behaviour that results in a physical and a psychological addiction to nicotine. Accordingly, stopping smoking is difficult, despite 65% of smokers acknowledging that they actually do want to quit. So hard, in fact, that smokers fail to change their behaviour when faced with substantial price increases, which have very little effect other than to make those suffering from addiction also suffer from poverty.

7:49Interestingly, the efforts of the British Lung Foundation changed UK law and resulted in three behavioural techniques being applied to the sale of nicotine. Now, all tobacco products have to use drab, standardised packaging. The packets need to show prominent warnings of the effect of smoking, as well as accompanying photos of tar-filled lungs, tongue cancer, and children on inhalation machines.

8:19And finally, all tobacco is now hidden from view in stores. The effect of these behavioural interventions has been to significantly reduce smoking among UK adults, and it has halved the number of children under 16 smoking, which is the lowest figure on record.

8:40But let's return to individual interventions. In Self Help Without the Hype, Epstein relays a dialogue between a nephew asking his uncle how he cultivates his creativity. The uncle in the story is quite plainly meant to be B.F. Skinner, and he shows how modifying his working environment helped his writing. Here's a quote from Uncle Fred from the book. Look at my desk. Do you see the shelves

9:10and the cubbyholes all around it? Gradually, over the years, I've arranged them in a very special way. They contain the tools I need to write, and they're all immediately at hand. My thesaurus and dictionaries, my collections of quotations, my guides to good writing, my typewriter, paper, pencils, pens, erasers, and so on. By having everything at hand, I make my work smooth and pleasant, and I eliminate silly excuses

9:42for not working. Now, in a time before the internet, and that was written back in 1996, moving physical tools to be close at hand was a wise behaviour technique. Now, having dictionaries and thesaurus tools readily available online means they're closer to us than ever. But, so also are digital distractions. A contemporary version of Epstein's dialogue may instead focus on modifying

10:14the digital working environment to keep distractions out of sight. Email, messaging services such as Slack are so easy to access, we can all too easily find ourselves preoccupied by their constant distraction. So much so, that research has shown that having tools like Slack open is enough to cause a cognitive deterioration in attention, even without any messages coming through.

10:45In the book, Uncle Fred tells his nephew about the importance of taking breaks from work in every hour. He calls this his hour power. I've actually adopted this principle to allow for a digital downtime when I'm working. I have a physical hourglass on my desk and during this time I have all my digital services turned off. When my hour is up, I check my emails for anything that needs my immediate attention.

11:15If I can answer something within a couple of minutes, I respond immediately and anything else I pin in my email client. Between 8.30 in the morning and 9, and again between 2 and 2.30 in the afternoon, I allow myself time to answer the more complex emails before again switching everything off and getting back to work. This works for me, mostly, but you should obviously experiment with what works for you. Here's a quote from Uncle Fred

11:45in the book. I never gave you any specific advice today about any of your problems. Instead, I told you about a simple and powerful technique, modifying your environment. And then I gave you examples of how I've used this technique to manage my own behaviour. So the first technique is modify your environment. Let's move on to the second,

Monitor Behaviour and Make Commitments

12:14which is monitor your behaviour.

12:17In Epstein's book, the nephew in the story challenges himself to stop the habit of biting his nails. Uncle Fred tells him to experiment with modifying his environment to help reduce the change and importantly to keep a record of when it occurs.

12:35It turns out that this second instruction is actually the second secret to self-management.

12:41Paying close attention to what you do changes what you do, Uncle Fred explains. Self-monitoring has the effect of both focusing our attention on our challenge as well as keeping a record of our success. In an insightful passage in the book, Uncle Fred explains his approach to healthy eating.

13:04Let me give you a word of advice about dieting. Don't. Can you imagine dieting for the rest of your life? What an oppressive thought. Don't diet. Manage your eating and your health-related behaviours and do it for life.

13:24He goes on to explain how he modified his environment by sticking a photo of a younger and slimmer him on his refrigerator and moving his weighing scales from the bathroom into the kitchen. He then monitored his behaviour by sticking a chart and marker to the kitchen wall to record his weight. The combination made him more aware of his weight and gradually helped him change his eating habits permanently without needing to resort to a temporary diet.

13:55Of course, the digital world now makes it easier than ever for us to record all manner of habits and routines. There are multitudes of tracking apps available and the rise in wearable health technology means we can track many aspects of our lives with no effort at all. These digital aids are useful but sometimes the easy way isn't always the most effective way.

14:25Automatic tracking removes the cognitive effort from you and can put a distance between you and your primary objective.

14:34For instance, smart weighing scales are simple as they automatically upload your weight to their apps so you can track it. But is this as effective as manually marking your weight on a poster that you walk past on the way to the fridge?

14:52A recent concern is about the amount of time we spend staring at our smartphones. According to a 2018 Ofcom report, the average person in the UK spends more than a day a week online and checks their phone every 12 minutes. In response, Apple and Android as well have both baked in a couple of features into their OS to help us self-manage our digital behaviour.

15:21Firstly, screen time provides a breakdown of the amount of time spent on each app. In other words, it monitors your digital behaviour. You can then commit to changing your behaviour by setting app limits which blocks your access to individual apps or entire categories of apps.

15:40Now this act of committing ahead of time leads us nicely to the final self-management technique.

15:48Make commitments using the app limit feature from Apple is the digital equivalent of Odysseus deciding to tie himself to a ship's mast before sailing past the sirens in the old Greek myths.

16:04Odysseus knew he'd become weak at the time of hearing the sirens deadly songs so he made a commitment ahead of time to save himself. We can now do the same by committing to a screen time quota before the automatic shutters come down to save us. And this embodies the third secret to self-management making commitments.

16:29Making a commitment to change your behaviour should be done when you're in a cold and unemotional state of mind and should be done openly. In the book Epstein relays how the uncle employed this technique to curb his own behaviour using a ceramic sculpture of a horse made by a close friend who died from cancer. Here's a quote from the book. As a young man I was easily angered. Like most parents I lost

17:00control of myself and yelled at my children sometimes usually over nothing. One day I yelled at my three-year-old daughter and she got scared and fell down the stairs to the basement. She wasn't hurt but she was crying. I called everyone together in this room and I said if I ever raise my voice to any of you again I want you to smash this sculpture.

17:27I never ever raised my voice to my wife or my children again.

17:34Making the commitment openly and using his family members as reinforcers helped to motivate Uncle Fred to stick to his promise. You don't always need to be so public though as once again digital innovations have popped up which could help. One example is the Snooze and Lose alarm clock which automatically donates money to charity if you're tempted to hit the snooze button in the morning.

18:03More accessible than a real clock, apps such as Wake or Donate, Snooze and iCuckoo all use the same idea of committing to get out of bed by setting charitable donations for ignoring your alarm.

18:19Now Skinner himself was a technophile and was an advocate of using gadgets to help wherever possible. He said the point is to construct your world so that it makes you the kind of person you want to be and gizmos can help.

18:38Now while Skinner's gizmos were levers, pulleys, notes and buzzers, I believe he would be very excited by the opportunities that new smart devices offer us for self-management.

18:51B.J. Fogg, a professor at Stanford University, has taken this idea forward with his ideas of persuasive technology and how we can use computers and mobiles to change what we think and do. You can pick up a copy of his book, Persuasive Technology, to read up more about this.

19:12Here's another quote from Self-Help Without the Hype from Uncle Fred. In everyday life, most people learn a small handful of self-management tricks, like setting an alarm clock. You, on the other hand, have learned three general self-management skills. Modify your environment, monitor your behaviour and make commitments. These skills will allow you to develop thousands of self-management programmes of your

19:44own to suit almost any situation.

19:50So, that is how a behaviourist, such as B.F. Skinner, would approach their New Year's resolutions, and importantly, stick to them. Remember, it's important to find out your own versions of applying these three general principles. If one method fails, try another, or try several at once. Good luck with whatever resolutions you set yourself this year. Try and remember the three M's, and you'll be more likely to sail past

20:21Quitter's Day on January 17th. You can currently buy a copy of the new edition of Self-Help Without the Hype, that's the one with my new forward in it, at a discounted price for New Year. If you're a Kindle person, then head over to Amazon, where it is an offer for £2.99, that's around $3.49. But if you prefer to have a physical copy, so you can write notes in the margins like I do, then head over to books.by

20:53forward slash Paul Davis. That's books.by, and that's B-Y, forward slash Paul Davis, where it is currently $7.49, which is about £5.60 in the UK. Bargain. I'll put all the links to the book in the show notes, so you can just click those really simply if you're interested. Thank you so much for listening, good luck with your resolutions, and remember that self-management has nothing to do with

21:23willpower. Learning the simple lessons from Uncle Fred, and adopting and adapting where necessary, Epstein's three principles offers you a way to take control of your environment and augment your weak willpower. See you next time.

21:43I'll see you next time. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.