BONUS | Why Your New Year’s Resolutions Always Fail (with Dr. Rangan Chatterjee)

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1:09Because the reality is a lot of people have that sensation, that feeling, that desire, and then most resolutions go nowhere and people spend another year as exactly the same person. I mean, I spent a long time thinking about this because why is it that, you know, depending which research study you read, 80 to 90 % in New Year's resolutions have fallen by the wayside by the start of February, right? Okay. And I've got 23 years of clinical experience. So I've seen tens of thousands of patients. So I kind of feel I've got a good steer. certainly from my own experience and what I've seen. I think there's a few things that people get wrong.

1:44Okay. I think they try and make it too big too quickly, which I have seen people do that. Generally speaking, the people who can transform their lives overnight, they've generally had some really, really big life experience, a divorce, a bereavement, they've lost the house, something big. Yeah, you can do it. But if you don't have that driving you, I think if you make it too big, you're never going to make it last in the long term. Right. So there's a couple of things to say about these resolutions. Right. So one thing I don't think people understand enough is that every single behavior in our life serves a role.

2:23Too often we try and change the behavior without understanding the role it plays in our life. So I'll give you a really practical example. If your alcohol consumption is your way of managing stress. You can white knuckle it for the first two or three weeks of January and you will stop. And you'll think, yeah, I've got more energy. I'm sleeping better. Great, great, great. I have no problem with that. But if it's your way of managing stress, the only way you'll change it in the long term is by one of two things. Either the amount of stress in your life has to change, so then you'll no longer need the alcohol, or you need an alternative behavior to alcohol to help you manage the stress it sounds so obvious when i put it like that but most people in my experience are caught up in their lives and they're they're focused too much on the behavior instead of being focused on what role does behavior play and so i've come to the conclusion that and this is really one of the primary theses in make change that lasts my new book is this idea that it's not necessarily the behavior you need to focus on.

3:31It's the energy behind the behavior. What's it doing for you? Why are you doing it? And the other way I look at it for New Year's resolutions is all behaviors, I believe, come from either love or fear, right? At their core. Sure. So if you feel bad about who you are, you're consumed with guilt and shame and jealousy and envy or whatever it might be. These are all things that come from the energy of fear. if your changes are coming from that kind of energy i don't think they're going to last in the long term because you're trying to overcome like the behavior is in conflict with who you consider yourself to be this was me a few years ago right so i would say right this year i'm going to meditate and i'd do 20 minutes of meditation every morning until like the 16th of january then i'll miss a day because work gets busy and i beat myself up in my head negative self-talk, I'd be, wrong, you couldn't do it, could you, this year?

4:26You're a loser. I used to have a really negative inner voice. I've completely changed that over the years with these kind of intentional practices. And now I find behavior change really, really simple because I've focused on the underlying energies behind that behavior change. And one of the things I try to kind of address in this book, Ryan, is I'm a doctor, right? So through the lens of health, I think we're living in a world where we've got more information than ever before. More health podcasts, more health books, more blogs, whatever it might be. But why, despite all this increase in information and knowledge, is it not translating to better health outcomes?

5:07We know what we should, most of us know what we should do or not do. Exactly. So, you know, I really tried hard with this book. It's going, no, no, no. There's a lot of what we should be doing out there. I've written books on what we should be doing this book addresses the why why are we still doing the things that we know are harming us and i think a lot of it is internal it comes to our internal world and people don't want to go there but that's where the gold is it's funny uh so every year for daily stoic we do this thing we call the daily stoic new year new challenge it's like 21 days of stoic inspired challenges it's different every year but it's just a bunch of cool stoic practices the idea is like Like one or two will stick with someone and they'll take it through the year.

5:52One will get them to think about something differently. But it's funny. Like we'll start talking about it in early December. The first day you announce it, a bunch of people sign up. Second time you announce a bunch of people sign up. And then it sort of dips. And then it starts on January 1st. But like the second biggest signup day is always like January 2nd. So like people want to change. Like at some level they heard about this. They want to change. And then what we do, I think this is the most insidious part of what gets in the way of so much of what we're capable of doing, is we go, okay, I'm going to do it tomorrow.

6:29They go, okay, that starts on January 1st. So that's a couple weeks from now. So in a couple weeks from now, I'll get serious about thinking about signing up. And then I'll miss it, which is the Stoics talk about how we know what we need to do. but then we say we tell ourselves this huge lie which is like i'll do it in the morning i'll do it after this i'll do it when things calm down by just moving the timeline up a little bit we let ourselves off the hook and then most of us don't do it it's i completely agree it's what i've seen in patients for years it's it's always next week or next monday or next month but when the kids are older yeah it starts today so another five minute practice i try and do each day is what my wife and I call the five minute tea ritual.

7:13Like many people, if you're not intentional about it, you can live in the same house, but you get so busy with work and the children and you're like passing ships. So a few years ago, we decided, yeah, listen, yeah, life gets busy from time to time, but we really need to intentionally focus on our relationship. So we have this practice called the five minute tea ritual. Every night when the kids were younger, and we still try and do it now when they've gone to bed before we do anything else we come to the kitchen we make a pot of mint tea so non-caffeinated and it's not the rule the practice is that for five minutes we catch up yeah right so it's only five minutes it's the requirement so we're just going to ask each other about our days right instead of uh we got to get a babysitter we're going to book a restaurant reservation we're going to you make it too big and then you're like we can't do it this yeah and it's like before you know it's a few months before you did anything and what's really interesting is and i think this this builds on this five minute action each day uh principle that that we're talking about it's not that some days those five minutes don't become 30 minutes or an hour yes more often than not more often than not they do because it's actually oh this is much more fun than going on netflix or youtube whatever it might be it's like oh this is you know this is why i married you right we actually want to sit together we like each other Yeah.

8:29But some days, one of us will say, actually, it's just going to be five minutes a day. Like, I've actually got a few emails to do or whatever it might be. Whenever we felt, either one of us, oh, we're too busy. And it's been a few days without that practice. It's really interesting. You can feel it in our relationship. The niggles, the small things start to bother us. There's less intimacy. There's less connection. but when we are quite disciplined about the five minute tea ritual everything else in our relationship and therefore our lives and our health starts to get better right and so i'm a huge fan of these small things that we do consistently i have found time and time again with me and with thousands of my patients these are the things that i think move the needle for most people.

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12:06I mean, there's a writing rule of two crappy pages a day. Yeah, it seems like the opposite of how you would get good writing to set a goal to do bad writing. But what it's doing is it's dramatically lowering the stakes. It's making it attainable. And it's actually hard to do crappy pages. But the idea is you got to do crappy pages and to do great pages. They share one similarity, which is that you have to show up. Yeah. And so by lowering the stakes, you can create the room to create positive momentum. And then the other thing, which I think is a rule we don't or I guess a factor, a fact of life we don't talk about enough, which is I think quantity is a way to get to quality.

12:48Yeah. So it's like, let's say every day for a month, you sit down with your spouse and you have five minutes. A lot of those are going to be five minutes of nothingness. But one of those or a handful of those are really going to be significant, which you only could have had by having the larger number. Right. Like and so the more you sit down and do the thing, what you're doing is increasing your chances of having those really transcendent days. And so, but people focus on like, you know what, like for writing, they're like, I'm going to rent a cabin. I'm going to go there and I'm going to have two great weeks in a row.

13:23No, you're not. You're not. First off, you're not going to do it. And then second, like you're going to have five of those days be crappy. And as a result, like you're not going to return with the things that you needed. So it's more about the day-to-dayness, the consistency and the quantity that gets you. You see this with health, right? So let's use the example of working out, which is a desire that many people have at all times, but particularly at the new year, right? It's like, I want to move my body more. I'm spending too much time at the desk. People start to get paralyzed with choice, right?

13:57Oh, what, you know, am I going to run? I'm going to do yoga. I'm going to do Pilates. I'm going to, you know, what is that I'm going to do? And I've had patients before where they've literally got angina pains in their heart. But we talk about physical activity. A month later, they're still coming back saying, hey, Dodger, I can't decide which one to do. And I understand that. I have sympathy. But the point is, frankly, any of them are going to help you. You could have just walked here and that would have solved this problem. And that would have helped you. And so through the lens of my five-minute strength workout, people say, what, do you do the same thing every day?

14:27Actually, for many years, I did. Because if you have to decide every morning, oh, what am I going to do today? That's procrastination. That's choice. That leads to indecision and inaction. And we know this in business, in the business world. When Amazon moved to one-click ordering about 10 years ago or so, estimates say their profits went up by$300 million a year. Because back then, I don't know if you can remember this, but there were four or five steps to take before you could purchase. You have to confirm order, put in your car details on a news screen. There's three or four process each time you have another option it's a reason that you can pull out of the behavior and so the reason we brush our teeth each night well one of the reasons is because the same action every day on tuesday evening we don't go you know what i brushed yesterday yeah let me do something different today i'm going to floss today and then on wednesday we don't go i brush and i thought i'm just going to rinse today we don't do that we know if you had to assemble the toothbrush you had to unpackage it if you had to make the toothpaste do it yeah right and so that's why my dumbbell and kettlebell lives in my kitchen my cafeteria is there it all works together it is so easy i can barely not do it now going back to news resolutions there's another i think for me it's a big idea that i don't think we're talking about enough right and i think it is a way of connecting a lot of your writings and and practices with health which and i think sometimes people don't see the connection right so i believe that a lot of the reason why we can't make changes that last is because we don't understand the internal drivers that are leading us to those practices

16:17hey it's ryan thank you for listening to the daily stoic podcast i just wanted to say we so appreciate it we love serving you it's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded of these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.

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