Keeping your New Year's resolutions is not about how much willpower you have. New research suggests the most self-controlled people don't rely on willpower, but prevent irresistible desires from emerging by creating environments where temptations simply don’t arise. By controlling our environment, rather than by attempting to control ourselves, we can keep our actions in line with our goals – and maybe even stick to our resolutions this year.
Each year, millions of people make New Year’s resolutions, with goals like exercising more, saving more money, losing weight, improving one’s diet, and spending less time on social media among the most popular in recent years. However, it seems that most people fail to keep their resolutions for very long, with some studies suggesting that by six months about 60% of individuals fail to maintain their commitments and that about 80% have failed after two years.
Making significant changes to patterns in your daily life is hard, and there are many reasons that people fail to achieve what they resolve to do. For example, you may set an unrealistic or overly general goal or set a realistic goal but fail to outline intermediate steps to achieve it. Yet, even if you avoid these problems, there will be times when you are faced with potential temptations to break your resolution: to sleep in instead of going to the gym, to buy that expensive latte instead of saving a bit of money, to eat a second piece of cheesecake instead of sticking to your diet. To keep a resolution for any significant amount of time, you need self-control.
But what is self-control, and how can we be more self-controlled if we find ourselves too easily doing things that we judge not to be in our best interest? I’ll outline reasons to think that some longstanding assumptions about self-control are misguided and that standard categories of self-control fail to map onto actual human psychology. Abandoning, or radically revising, these assumptions and categories may help us better understand what our self-control capacities are like and how they can be improved.
In recent decades, philosophical work on self-control has focused on self-control as a psychological state—exercising self-control at a particular moment in time. Much of this work tries to resolve puzzles posed by a particular kind of state self-control—synchronic self-control, which occurs when you exercise self-control against a simultaneous desire that conflicts with your evaluative judgment about what it is best to do. (Call this a simultaneous “conflicting desire” for short.) However, if we are interested in the kind of self-control involved in keeping a resolution for months or years, it seems that we should also investigate what it is to be a self-controlled person—what is involved in having a high-level of self-control as a psychological trait.
One common conception of trait self-control traces back to the Aristotelian notion of enkrateia, literally “empowered [over oneself],” which is usually translated as “continence”—a term for self-restraint or holding back that now unfortunately is mainly used in ordinary speech to refer to control over one’s excretory functions. Enkratic people regularly experience conflicting desires, but they are good at directly resisting or inhibiting those desires in the moment. So, an enkratic person who is committed to eating a healthy diet will regularly want to eat junk food but will usually successfully resist these desires.
6th January 2025
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