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Why New Year’s resolutions are so hard to keep

Perspective

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

January 15, 2012|By Moshe Bar

(ILLUSTRATION BY ALEX NABAUM )

I quit smoking on a Monday last August, outside JFK airport. I gave my pack to an appreciative stranger, who smiled with sympathy and said that the last time he quit was outside Chicago’s O’Hare. I had been smoking three cigarettes a day for many years; never been tempted to quit in earnest, but also rarely felt an urge to smoke more. But 42 days after quitting, I bought another pack and lit up. You know the story.

Chances are, a couple of weeks ago you made a New Year’s resolution that involved your health – maybe you wanted to quit smoking, drink less, or shed a few pounds. And chances are, your resolve is already wavering. There hasn’t been much research on how well people stick to their resolutions, but it looks as if many fold within a mere two to six weeks. In other words, right about now.

Why is it so difficult to stop doing things we know are bad for us? The answer lies in recognizing a couple of intriguing ideas about how our brains work. First, they seek to be rewarded constantly. Second, those rewards – manifested as pleasure and positive mood – are made up of neurotransmitters such as serotonin, dopamine, and endorphins. These molecules stock the shelves of the best opium den in the world, the one right between our ears, and we’re all hooked on them.

Each of us has an optimal mood “zone,” the mood in which we prefer to be, and trying to get there guides many of our choices. One way to reach the zone is by being an active and productive member of society. Achieving at work, watching your child score a winning goal, buying a house, publishing a much-talked-about paper, getting even the smallest recognition, all result in a reward of brain chemicals. Neurotransmitters are nature’s trick for encouraging us to do what is supposedly best for us.

But there are also shortcuts to getting the same rewards without the effort that they normally require. In a famous experiment from the 1950s, scientists implanted electrodes in the brains of rats in areas that were later dubbed “pleasure centers.” The rats controlled the flow of current by pressing a lever. The pleasure they elicited by doing so was so effective that they pressed the levers almost nonstop – sometimes 2,000 times an hour – forgoing even food and water until they collapsed from exhaustion.