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A lot of people make New Year's resolutions. How many people actually do New Year's resolutions? About half of Americans, Between a third and a half of Americans, about 22% of them have failed within one week. About 50% have failed within three months, and 81% have failed within two years. That is to say that most people fail quickly. And for the big overwhelming majority, the habits they're trying to create are not permanent. What do most New Year's resolutions have in common that actually leads to their likelihood of being unsuccessful? The answer is they tend to be negative. What we really want is how to make better resolutions that are more likely to succeed. And I've got the data to tell you exactly how to get this done. There are three steps. Hey, friends, welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. Happy New Year. Almost. Maybe you're watching this before the New Year. Maybe you're watching this after the New Year. And this is the New Year's episode. New Year, new you, more happiness. I want to tell you today about New Year's resolutions. Why they fail, how they can succeed, and what are the New Year's resolutions that, if they succeed, will bring you the most happiness. So my goal today is to give you better resolutions and the protocols that will lead you to more resolution success. Let's see what we do here. And let's see if you can actually have a better year in 2026 because you are trying to improve yourself. Now, how do I know you want to improve yourself? You're watching or listening to Office Hours. This is a show about how you can actually become a happier person and bring more happiness into the world. That's inherently a productive thing to do. Thank you for being part of this audience and for bringing this show to other people. My mission is to lift you up and bring you together with the people that you love this time of year and all times of year. And have you become a teacher of this so you can lift other people up in bonds of happiness and love? Using the science and ideas that I propagate in the show, the idea is to do it in language that you can actually understand and most importantly, language that you can share, because it doesn't mean anything unless you actually take this out to the world as well. We need a generation of happiness teachers. This should be our vocation, is to lift other people up in bonds of happiness and love. If you like something that you see here and you want to feedback on it, you've got criticism, if you've got ideas, questions, anything, please do write to me at office hours@arthurbrooks.com that is printed above or below me right now. And don't forget to leave a review on Spotify or Apple or whatever your platform is of choice. All right, let's get started on what we're trying to do here today. A lot of people make New Year's resolutions. I always used to be kind of against it, like it's so dumb, like why, why isn't any particular day, it's so arbitrary. Why January 1st? And the truth of it is that, that this is a, this is an ancient rite. New Year's Day actually goes back to the ancient Romans. January is named for Janus, the the two. And in January they would make a resolution to the God, the two faced God, that they would be better in the coming year. And the belief is that that would give them, you know, better luck. Whether it did or not, it sort of depends on whether or not they were good at the resolutions per se. It's sort of superstitious in a way, but it doesn't have to be. My point being, however, that this is a venerable tradition. This isn't just some sort of goofy self improvement manifesting type of thing. This goes way back to the idea that there's certain points on the calendar, January 1st, your birthday, your 30th birthday, whatever it happens to be, where you can mark that as the beginning of a moment of forward progress that you can chart in your life. And the reason that people do that is because it tends to kind of work. There's a lot about that. People will often say that I started doing something really positive in my life and it wasn't just an arbitrary Thursday in March that wasn't related to anything on the calendar. It generally speaking had to do with something that was momentous, something that had had meaning to them. You find, for example, that on the nines and on the zeros on birthdays. There's a lot of research on this. People do all sorts of weird things. They're more likely to run half marathons when they, when like on at 59 and at 60. They're also unfortunately more likely to engage in extramarital affairs because they're sort of like my life, you know, they're taking stock on all these types of things. We're going to keep this on the positive side on the resolutions that you make to be actual better person. And. And we're going to talk about the New Year's resolutions in particular. But again, everything I say here could be your birthday resolution can be Your whatever resolution. This is how you can be better at wanting to make a positive change in your life. Now, what do most New Year's resolutions have in common that actually leads to their likelihood of being unsuccessful? The answer is they tend to be negative. Even if they're couched as positive, they tend to be fundamentally negative, which is to say that they are an avoidance goal. There's two kinds of goals in life. There's approach goals and avoidance goals. And that's just how people in my business, as professional social scientists, they have to put, you know, words that don't sound intuitive on something, because that's how we get tenure, friends. Approach goals means, obviously you're going towards something, and that's positive. Avoidance goals are that you're going away from something that's negative. A lot of New Year's resolutions, even if you couch it in positive language, they're fundamentally negative. They're avoidance goals. For example, you say, I want to eat better. And what you're trying to do is to. To avoid bad health. And, and usually it's to lose weight. You know what, why do you want to eat fewer sweets is what it comes down to. Because you, you want to avoid having a bad blood test with your lipid profiles, you know, your large particle, ldl, whatever, or you just want to lose weight. That's really an avoidance goal. People talk about wanting to be more focused in their work. They want to procrastinate less because it's actually bad for their work and they feel bad about themselves. It's like, I want to save more money. Actually, what you want to do is spend less. You're trying to improve, get rid of these bad habits. So these negative goals that people actually have. I want to stop doing a thing I don't like. I want to break a bad habit. That's what most of these things have in common. And these avoidance goals, they tend to be hard and. I'll talk to you in a minute. Why avoidance goals? They tend to be especially hard for us. But let's get into the data about the fact that they're not that successful. There's a terrific psychologist at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania Norcross, who has been done, who's sort of the world's leading expert on New Year's resolutions. I mean, we all pick off this sort of part of the universe. His stuff is so great on this. And there's a really interesting article I'll put in the show Notes in the Journal of Clinical Psych. It goes back a few years, about 20 years old now, but it's called success. Predictors, change processes and self reported outcomes of New Year's resolvers and non resolvers. And this is sort of the canonical source of data, but all the data that come together, and here's basically what it comes down to, a little over 20% of people have failed in their New Year's resolutions by the end of one week. Oh, one data point before that, how many people actually do New Year's resolutions? About half of Americans, between a third and a half of Americans actually have New year's resolutions. About 22% of them have failed within one week, about 50% have failed within three months, and 81% have failed within two years. That is to say that most people fail quickly. And for most people, for the big overwhelming majority, 4 and 5, the habits they're trying to create are not permanent, or the habits they're trying to break, the breaking of the habit is not permanent, which is sort of grim. I mean, that's one of the reasons that gym membership goes through the roof like bonkers at the beginning of the year. And that's one of the reasons that your gym will, will take way more memberships than it could possibly deal with. And that's the reason that you probably don't like going to the gym the first week of January if you're a gym rat like me. One of the main reasons I first put a gym in my house in the first place, you know, when I didn't have the space or the money to do so, was because January was so horrible. I mean, I couldn't get a good workout in. I like to work out every single day. And you go to the gym and it's crazy. People don't know how to use the equipment. And every machine is in use. But don't worry, wait around, you know, by February 1st, things are really great. And by, you know, March, it's back to its old self. Your gym actually has sold way more memberships than it can possibly accommodate. Knowing that most people are not going to be using their gym memberships, they're just, you know, it's the triumph of hope. And these avoidance goals of, you know, trying to not, you know, be so unhealthy all the time, trying not to feel lazy or whatever it happens to be that they're trying to do to change themselves in this fundamentally negative way. So why do they fail? And this really gets back to this. There's this literature, great psych literature on avoidance versus approach goals, but there's two big reasons that These avoidance goals, negative goals. Why negative goals work less well than positive goals? Number one. Is that negative motivation? Well, it's negative. And when you're focusing all the time on something that's negative, that's basically unpleasant. You know, when you're thinking all the time like, you know, I want to go to the gym more and I want to, I want to stop eating junk food because I don't like the way that I look. You're going to be kind of going this, you know, ruminating on the negative in your life again and again and again and again. And what we find is that this negativity, it's really good for getting you to get up off the couch, but it's really bad over the even medium term for keeping you motivated. You don't stay motivated by negative stuff. This is one of the reasons that you find that you can negatively motivate your children very quickly, but you can't sustain it. You can negatively motivate your spouse, but over the long run it doesn't work at all. Well, the same thing is true for you because you're the most important manager of yourself. You are the most important relationship that you're trying to lead. And so therefore avoidance goals are not good for you either. They just, they're not motivating is the way that that works. You'll say, yeah, that got me to the gym totally. I don't want to look so crummy. I don't want to feel so crummy. But a week later you're like, I don't want to be thinking about the negative things in my life all the time. That's exhausting. It's not fun. And so you don't. And you rebel against the negativity. You're rebelling against your own negativity and that's why you've fallen away from these goals. That's the first reason. The second reason that, that, that avoidance goals are not great is because the thing that you're running away from is actually something you like. There's an immediate gratification that's involved. And you can stay away from your immediate gratification through willpower for a while, but you usually can't rely on your willpower for very long. There's a whole lot of these really interesting studies on the futility of willpower that I love. I mean, people who will, you know, they'll put their hand in ice cold water and the longer they hold it there through their willpower, the worse they are at being able to resist eating some sweets like a cookie. So you'll go into the experiment and the experimenter will ask you, do you want to eat this cookie? And you'll be like, no, I'm on a diet. And besides, it's 10 o' clock in the morning. I'm not going to eat this great big chocolate chip cookie. And you say, great. And you won't, by the way, even though the cookie is sitting right in front of you. But if you dip your hand in this water and hold it in there through sheer willpower, your willpower will wear out like a muscle. And after a couple of minutes, you pull your hand out and you'll eat the cookie. Because willpower is willpower. You can't keep it in, in place that long. What you really need to change is your habits. You can't be rolling on your willpower. And your willpower is really a lot about what people are doing with their avoidance goals and their New Year's resolutions. And there's an immediate gratification of things that will overpower willpower in the long run is what we find. So those two things are working together. And that's these are the big reasons that these negative goals lead to failure in relatively short order.