It’s Been A Week: Science and Art Are Telling You to Lighten Up

Photo by Sydney Sims on Unsplash

Resolutions have a dismal success rate: a quarter fail by mid-January and less than 10 percent are deemed successful by year’s end. The problem isn’t that we’re lazy or that winter is a lousy time to punish ourselves (although getting up at 6 a.m. to run in 20-degree weather isn’t exactly pleasurable).

What we’ve been taught about behavior change is wrong because it’s incomplete. Twenty years ago, with a newly-minted PhD, I believed that motivation was The Answer. That if workers were properly resourced with training, equipment and time, if expectations by their managers were clearly understood, and if results were linked to rewards deemed important to workers, they (and their companies) would be successful and satisfied.

Like individual resolutions, organization-wide change initiatives fail at about the same rate (if you’re wondering). But back to you.

Motivation IS important, but it’s not The Answer. You may have set yourself up for success: You’ve rid your pantry of the crap, adopted a new schedule, a “buddy” is part of your plan, and you’re going to measure progress. What’s the problem?

The problem seems two-fold, only one of which suggests we have some real agency. The first is powerful evidence of a type of neurochemical-hormonal-evolutionary determinism in Robert Sapolsky’s Behave. That virtually every one of our actions is unavoidably caused by preceding events in the world, including those in our brain. So, is there such a thing as free will? Not according to Sapolsky, at least to the grander extent we imagine we possess.

The second problem may be linked to our never-ending, almost pathological quest to find happiness. In doing (exercising) or not doing (eating carbs), we’ll be healthier (thinner, more attractive), which will certainly make us happier.

The Power of Paradox

The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking has become my anti-self-help bible. I revisit it every year. Oliver Burkeman’s compelling idea is that our constant efforts to eliminate the negative — insecurity, uncertainty, failure, or sadness — are what causes us to feel so insecure, unsure, doomed to fail, or unhappy. After years of research on several continents…