Make your New Year Resolution come true

It is the time of year when we once again make New Year resolutions, “I plan to exercise every day,” “I will stop drinking,” “I will eat less processed foods and more fruits and vegetables.” We use our will power and positive thoughts to begin these new activities; however, our will power often fades out and we quickly fall of the wagon. The reason vary such as,  I had planned to jog today; however it is raining, I was planning to eat more vegies; however, I had dinner with a friend and ate a juicy hamburger, I had planned to meditate; however, I needed to help my son.  So many other things took priority and the motivation disappeared.. 

Yet it is possible to be successful with starting and then maintaining new health promoting habits. The key is to increase the friction for the behaviors that you want to reduce and decrease the friction for behaviors that you want to increase. Friction is the extra work you need to do in order to do the task. For example, to eat fewer cookies, increase the friction by not having them in the house (you now have to go to the store to buy them) or by placing them somewhere where it takes greater effort to get them such as the top shelf for which that you need a small ladder to reach them.  The extra effort (increased friction) brings awareness to the automatic behavior.  At that point, you can interrupt your unconscious eating pattern and choose to do something else. On the other hand, to increase eating fruits, decrease the friction by having the fruit right in front of you on the table so that you can take one without thinking.

The key is to interrupt the habit chain of behavior you want to reduce and automate the habit chains of behaviors you want to increase.  The more you do a behavior and the more pleasurable it is, the more likely will the new behaviore become an automatic habit.  To learn how to change friction and how to be successful in creating new habits, listen to Shankar Vedantam Hidden Brain’s Podcast, Creatures of Habit.