New Years Resolution

It's that time of year again where most of us starting thinking about making new years resolutions.  The hope is that we can change ourself and better ourself by sticking to our resolutions. And did you now that it is a fairly common, roughly 50% of all Americans will set some sort of  new year’s resolution .

Unfortunately those 50% of Americans that set resolutions, 80% of those resolutions will fail according to  researcher Richard Wiseman. That’s 156 million failed resolutions and disappointed minds each and every year.

So why do so many of us fail?

The real answer is that your brain can’t handle new year’s resolutions, sad but true, and here is why.

In order to stick to our new year’s resolutions we need willpower. Our brain cells that operate willpower are located in the prefrontal cortex, which is the area right behind our forehead.

That particular area of our brain is also responsible for staying focused, handling short-term memory and solving abstract tasks for example.



Now, when we set a new year’s resolution, an enormous amount of willpower is required. It’s an amount that our brain simply can’t handle. This can be described through a Stanford experiment by Prof. Baba Shiv:


A group of undergraduate students were divided into 2 groups. One group was given a two-digit number to remember. The other was given a seven-digit number to remember. Then, after a short walk through the hall, they were offered the choice between two snacks: a slice of chocolate cake or a bowl of fruit. What’s most surprising: The students with 7-digit numbers to remember were twice as likely to pick the slice of chocolate compared to the students with the 2-digits.

What can we learn from this study? According to Prof. Shiv, it’s very obvious:

“Those extra numbers took up valuable space in the brain—the students were in  “cognitive load”—making it that much harder to resist a decadent dessert.”

So your pre-frontal cortex that handles willpower is like a muscle, that needs to be trained. If you decide to train that muscle at the start of the new year with a resolution to quit smoking, start going to the gym, or lose lots of weight, that’s the equivalent of a 300 pound barbell you want to lift without any previous training. You need to train that muscle with a small resolution, one that it can handle, such as going to the gym one day a week.

Quick fact: Strong Willpower is not a character trait

One very comforting and important fact is that having strong willpower is not something we’re born with as opposed to popular opinion.

“Research suggests that willpower itself is inherently limited, and that our January promises fail in large part because the brain wasn’t built for success.”

So just like your bicep has to be trained in order to grow stronger, so has the prefrontal cortex in your brain. The key is to make sure not to start lifting too heavy, as then we’re bound to drop everything on the floor with our new year’s resolutions.