"It works, people do it"

You might object that resolutions do work, that you know people who got fit one January and stayed fit. You'd be right, and it's worth being precise about how right.

John Norcross, Marci Mrykalo and Matthew Blagys followed 159 people who'd made a New Year's resolution and 123 people who wanted to change the same sorts of things but hadn't made one, and phoned them over six months. At six months, 46 percent of the resolvers said they'd been continuously successful, against 4 percent of the people who hadn't resolved. The groups didn't differ in who they were or what they wanted to change, and the most common goals were weight, exercise and smoking. Martin Oscarsson, Per Carlbring, Gerhard Andersson and Alexander Rozental ran a larger study in Sweden, published in 2020, with 1,066 members of the public who made a resolution, and at a year 55 percent of those who answered said they'd kept it. So yes. Stating the wish is far better than not stating it, and a fair share of people keep theirs.

Now look at what else those studies found, because it's the part that matters for the rerun. Norcross and colleagues found that what predicted success, measured before the first of January, wasn't how much people wanted it. It was self-efficacy, which is the belief that you can do the specific thing, skills to change, and readiness. And once the year started, the people who succeeded used more practical, behavioural methods and fewer of the methods that raise awareness and feeling. Oscarsson and colleagues found that people whose goals were about approaching something, doing more of a thing, did better than people whose goals were about avoiding something, and that the group given some information and exercises on setting goals did better than the group given none. Interestingly, the group given more extensive support didn't do better than the group given some.

Read those two together and the shape is clear. Resolving helps. Wanting doesn't predict much. Knowing what you'll actually do, and having a goal that's a thing to do rather than a thing to stop, predicts more. Those are exactly the things the wish, as most people write it, leaves out.

So the answer to "it works, people do it" is that it does, for roughly half, and the half it works for aren't the half who wanted it most. They're the half who had, by luck or habit, turned the wish into something closer to a Tuesday. The rest of this book is about doing that on purpose.