A Better Way to Think About New Year’s Resolutions

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In the long run, resolutions that keep others in mind tend to have greater staying power. Studies have found that brute willpower alone lasts for only so long, and that people have a much harder time accessing willpower when stressed. This might help explain why a more individual New Year’s goal, such as losing 10 pounds by swearing off ice cream, may be more likely to fizzle. “If you fail in your quest, then the only person you have ‘let down’ is yourself,” Kurz said. Evolutionarily speaking, people might not even be built to set self-serving goals. What helped our human ancestors succeed were likely “strong social bonds,” the psychologist David Desteno wrote in a New York Times article about resolutions, “relationships that would encourage people to cooperate and lend support to one another.”

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