Before you start

This is a short book and you can read it in two or three sittings. It's about one habit, which is setting a large goal at the start of the year, feeling wonderful about it for a fortnight, losing it somewhere in February, and setting the same goal again the next January with a little less belief and a little more shame. Get fit. Lose the weight. Write the book. Learn the language. Sort the money. Drink less. See more of people. The list is probably familiar, and some of the entries have been on it for years.

I'm going to argue three things. The first is that the habit makes sense from the inside. The new year feels like a clean page, and it feels that way for a reason that researchers have measured. The goal is a picture of a better life, and looking at the picture is genuinely pleasant. And a stated resolution does help, more than not stating one, which is a finding and not a slogan. The second is that the goal as you usually set it is a wish about an outcome, and outcomes don't happen. Tuesdays happen. What you wrote down on the first of January says nothing about a wet Tuesday in February when you're tired, the meeting overran and the picture has faded, and that Tuesday is where the goal is decided. The research on this is fairly clear. Wanting an outcome more doesn't produce it, and vividly imagining it can produce less effort, not more. What moves the numbers is a plain sentence about when and where you'll do the thing, and the size of the thing being small enough to survive an ordinary bad day. The third is practical. One wish, turned into a sentence about a Tuesday, at the smallest size that still counts, looked at for five minutes every Sunday. Chapters 18 to 20 cover how.

This book doesn't tell you to stop making resolutions or to want less. The wish is fine. It's the beginning of something. The book is about what has to come after the wish, and about why the collapse in February isn't the verdict on you that it feels like.

Two cautions. If the goal is weight, drink or money, there are earlier books in this series that take those habits apart properly, and chapter 21 names them and the NHS pages that go with them. And if the goal has been "feel better" for several Januaries running and you've felt low most of the day, most days, for a fortnight or more, the NHS says to see a GP, and no plan in this book replaces that.

The notes at the back give my sources and their limits. Where I'm giving my own reasoning and not a finding, I'll say so.