New Year’s resolutions. Some people love them, some hate them; but one thing’s for sure: hardly anyone sticks to them for more than a few weeks.
Yet most people are unsatisfied with at least some elements of their current lives – their health (including their weight), relationships, career trajectory, financial situation, or even elements of their own character.
Why is it that even when we want to change our lives, and even once we’ve acknowledged that if we want change, then we ourselves must do the changing (sorry to burst your bubble but no, that gadget you saw on the TV shopping channel won’t melt fat off your body while you sit on your tush; repeating affirmations won’t make Mr/Ms Right magically manifest; and the probability of you winning the lottery is vanishingly low), we still have such enormous trouble with making ourselves change in the ways we want to change?
I’ve been wrestling with this question since I was in my late teens. My quest to penetrate the murky swamp of human motivation was initially prompted by witnessing my father’s declining health, with the growing realisation that the ever-growing vortex of chronic illnesses into which he was drawn, which sucked away his quality of life and eventually robbed him of at least 10 years that he should have had, was being fuelled by his poor dietary and lifestyle choices.
My Dad was not a highly educated man but he possessed the native intelligence of a born engineer, which he deployed to solve a myriad of technical problems throughout his career and retirement. Yet he seemed powerless to alter his own behaviour in order to save his health, and ultimately his life.
“It’s just the way I’m built; I can’t change who I am,” he would tell me, with a helpless shrug of his shoulders, when I attempted to steer him toward better dietary choices or reconsidering his lifelong hatred of exercise.
Subsequently, after beginning clinical practice in 1995, I have observed countless iterations of this phenomenon: men and women, young, old and everything in between, who when attempting to solve their health problems, repeatedly crash into the same barrier to change: themselves.
And of course, I’ve smacked up against the same barrier myself, more times than I care to recall.
I’ve explored many different explanations for this strange and frustrating phenomenon – why we find it so hard to change, even when we want to – beginning with classical psychodynamic theories that our childhood experiences set us up for self-defeating behaviour patterns in later life, before roving through Buddhist psychology, cognitive behavioural theories, social learning theory, energy psychology, evolutionary psychology and behavioural genetics.
These disparate ways of understanding human behaviour may be strange bedfellows, but it’s only by delving into each theory and examining the evidence for and against it that I’ve been able to fully grasp the enormity of the task that we face when we attempt to change any of our behaviours, and particularly those that have become habitual.
In my upcoming webinar 2020 Vision: How to Craft the Life You Really Want… Even if you’ve never stuck to a New Year’s Resolution before I’ll be explaining in detail the integrated understanding of human behaviour that I’ve come to, and the clear path that this understanding lays out for optimising our health and happiness.
For the purposes of this article, however, I’m going to hone in on just one element: the fact that our brains have been moulded over evolutionary time to spur us to pursue activities that increase gene survival – that is, the prospect of us finding enough food (and avoiding becoming food for another animal, or being killed by a hostile member of our own species) in order to live long enough to find a suitable mate, have offspring, and take care of them well enough that they survive, find suitable mates, and repeat the process.
Do we consciously make decisions based on these goals of our ‘selfish genes’, as the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins aptly described them? Of course not. Since the first complex organisms developed, genes have been wiring the neural circuitry of each species to maximise their own survival by generating feelings of reward or pleasure in an organism’s nervous system when it engages in activities that promote gene survival (finding food, having sex); generating feelings of pain or withdrawal of reward when the organism is confronted with situations that threaten gene survival (starvation, being attacked by a predator or bested by a rival in a sexual display contest in which the prize is mating rights); and developing on-the-spot cost-benefit analysis mechanisms that ensure the organism conserves energy while pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain (pursue the wounded, sick, very young or old prey, not the fit and strong).
In other words, we’re aware of the feelings that our neurological circuits generate when we set, achieve or fail to achieve our goals, but we’re not consciously aware of the underlying gene survival-oriented motivational triad – maximise pleasure, minimise pain, conserve energy – that crafted these circuits over the long sweep of evolutionary time.
So when a woman wonders if she should invest effort in losing weight, or a man contemplates joining a gym in order to build a more muscular physique, neither is thinking to themselves, “If I achieve my goal, I will be much more likely to attract a mate of higher genetic quality, and hence our offspring will be advantaged in the mating stakes, and this will maximise the propagation of my genes.”
Yet the anticipatory pleasure that we experience when we imagine achieving our goals is an emotion that we are only capable of experiencing because we possess the neural circuitry fashioned by our ‘selfish genes’, which are intent on orchestrating our behaviour in order to ensure their own propagation.
Here’s the problem: what’s good for gene survival, isn’t necessarily good for our happiness. To put it bluntly, your genes don’t care whether you’re happy or not; their only motivation is their own perpetuation.
So you may well find that you garner the interest of more physically attractive sexual partners if you lose weight or get buff, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be happier with them; the compatibility that’s required for a successful long-term pairing is far more complex than sexual attraction.
At this stage, you might be wondering what any of this has to do with New Year’s resolutions, or any other attempt at self-improvement.
Concisely put, it’s this: people set goals because they believe that achieving those goals will make them happier, but they’re wrong. Here’s why:
The moods of happiness developed as a guidance system to encourage organisms to pursue gene survival-oriented goals, in the absence of immediate reward.
Happiness, in a sense, is an evolutionary lure to encourage organisms to continue to engage in activities that might ultimately result in the acquisition of food or receptive mates, for which they will be rewarded with the sensation of pleasure.
Although many people use the terms interchangeably, happiness and pleasure are distinctly different from a neurochemical perspective. Brain circuits that utilise the neurotransmitter serotonin are activated when we feel happy, whereas brain circuits that utilise dopamine light up when we are experiencing the pleasurable sensation of reward.
And most critically, serotonergic circuits are activated by the experience of being deeply engaged in a process which we find personally meaningful, and the resultant happiness can persist over prolonged stretches of time; whereas dopamine-generated pleasure is an intense but necessarily short-lived experience. The serotonin-inducing relationship-building conversation can go on for hours, but the dopamine-fuelled orgasm can’t!
Have you ever achieved a goal, felt a momentary surge of elation, and then noticed a sense of let-down? Almost everyone has. It’s not because you picked the wrong goal to make you happy, it’s because achieving goals can never make you happy; it’s the process of working toward the goal that generates the experience of happiness.
And what does all this have to do with setting New Year’s resolutions, or any other intention to change your behaviour?
In a nutshell, if you want your intended change to be truly sustainable and life-enhancing, your focus needs to be on the process, not the outcome.
For example, people who manage to lose weight and keep it off permanently find a way to fall in love with the experience of making healthier food choices (process), rather than fixating on the number on the scales (outcome).
People who make exercise a regular part of their lives find a way to fall in love with the experience of moving their bodies (process), rather than fixating on completing a marathon or sculpting a six-pack (outcome).
I have found that most of my clients really struggle with reorienting themselves away from their outcome-focused goals and toward the process. It takes a lot of coaching on my part to wean them from their addiction to goals – which is not surprising, given how rewarding those surges of dopamine are!
But once they really start to grasp it, this reorientation is truly life-transforming. As a client whom I’ll call Natalie (not her real name) wrote,
“I did some journaling and started meditation and being kind to myself and took all the unrealistic expectations off and kept repeating ‘this is for life’. Once that statement sunk in my new lifestyle kicked in. I WANTED to eat well. Crap food just didn’t interest me. I stopped eating my emotions. I got up from the table with food on my plate and instead of telling myself I was wasting food so I had to eat it, it is now ‘I am feeding my compost worms’. I am loving eating from my garden. I am loving getting out into the sunshine and getting up at 5am to get in a walk by myself whilst hubby and kids still asleep and coming home to do some body weight exercises and stretching – this is the BEST way to start the day. I am now starting the day with my cup full so I can in turn give to my family.”
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