AppId is over the quota
1) Whatever you hope for this year — to lose weight, to exercise more, to spend less money — you’re much more likely to make improvements than someone who hasn’t made a formal resolution.
2) If you can make it through the rest of January, you have a good chance of lasting a lot longer.
3) With a few relatively painless strategies and new digital tools, you can significantly boost your odds of success.
Now for a not-so-uplifting prediction: Most people are not going to keep their resolutions all year long. They’ll start out with the best of intentions but the worst of strategies, expecting that they’ll somehow find the willpower to resist temptation after temptation. By the end of January, a third will have broken their resolutions, and by July more than half will have lapsed.
They’ll fail because they’ll eventually run out of willpower, which social scientists no longer regard as simply a metaphor. They’ve recently reported that willpower is a real form of mental energy, powered by glucose in the bloodstream, which is used up as you exert self-control.
The result is “ego depletion,” as this state of mental fatigue was named by Roy F. Baumeister, a social psychologist at Florida State University (and my co-author of a book on willpower). He and many of his colleagues have concluded that the way to keep a New Year’s resolution is to anticipate the limits of your willpower.
One of their newest studies, published last month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, tracked people’s reactions to temptations throughout the day. The study, led by Wilhelm Hofmann of the University of Chicago, showed that the people with the best self-control, paradoxically, are the ones who use their willpower less often. Instead of fending off one urge after another, these people set up their lives to minimize temptations. They play offense, not defense, using their willpower in advance so that they avoid crises, conserve their energy and outsource as much self-control as they can.
These strategies are particularly important if you’re trying to lose weight, which is the most typical New Year’s resolution as well as the most difficult. The more you starve your body, the less glucose there will be in your bloodstream, and that means less willpower. Because of this vicious cycle, even people with great self-control in the rest of their lives can have a terrible time remaining slim.
Self-restraint can seem harder than ever because there are so many new temptations being marketed — high-calorie foods, distracting gadgets, time-sucking Web sites. But there are also better strategies than ever available thanks to new research in both the lab and the real world, including vast troves of data from online programs for improving self-control.
Before we get to the data, consider how one well-financed pioneer put these strategies into practice. It is not exactly a typical story — the hero is a hedge fund manager who could afford the ultimate in outsourcing — but it’s a good outline of the future of self-control for the rest of us.
DOUG TEITELBAUM was utterly self-disciplined in business and utterly unable to control his weight. He ran a hedge fund in New York and made fortunes turning around companies like Barneys, the tony clothier, but he couldn’t stop himself from reaching nearly 375 pounds.
Once, he’d been a serious tennis player, but he’d had to give it up because the weight put too much strain on his 6-foot-1-inch frame and legs. At the age of 40, convinced his own willpower was not enough, he looked for outside help.
He had a gastric band surgically placed around his stomach, and he began slowly exercising again under the supervision of Jim Wharton, a trainer on the Upper West Side who worked with professional athletes. Then a new problem arose. After Mr. Teitelbaum’s company bought the Planet Hollywood chain, he had to go to Las Vegas to oversee the conversion of the old Aladdin into the Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino.
The Findings columnist for Science Times and co-author, with Roy F. Baumeister, of “Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 5, 2012
An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the Web site stickK.com’s analysis of contracts over the past three years. It was 125,000 contracts, not 200,000.
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