Happy New Year! It’s the beginning of another year, and many of us are participating in the tradition of making “resolutions” about the things we’d like to change. Where there’s a lot of good in setting positive goals and pursuing personal growth and progress, it can be extremely discouraging to fall short of these goals if the pressure is too high. With that in mind, we wanted to share this excerpt from a helpful article we found on Psychology Today’s website that suggests that willpower isn’t where it’s at for keeping resolutions. Read what they have to say, and if you’re in the greater Cleveland area and could use some help working out how to avoid temptation in the new year, we hope you’ll reach out.
Researchers tracked the lives of 159 college students over the course of a week. Five times every day a message was sent to the participants’ smartphones asking them to report if they were facing temptations, whether the temptations conflicted with their goals, and whether they had exercised willpower to resist the temptations. They were also asked to report how mentally depleted they were feeling.
At the end of each day, the participants completed a diary entry describing their energy levels—from having a lot left in the tank to being mentally exhausted. As a wrap-up, the researchers interviewed the students at the end of the semester to assess their progress on four important goals they’d identified at the start of the study.
The results showed that the participants who spent the most time flexing their willpower via self-control made less progress toward their goals than those who experienced the fewest temptations. And those who experienced the most temptations, whether or not they tried resisting them, reported feeling the most mentally depleted during the day and drained at night.
The results offer a few takeaways: (1) trying to resist temptations via willpower is draining, (2) simply facing temptations, whether or not we resist them, is draining and (3) being mentally drained from experiencing temptations correlates directly with making less progress. The key takeaway, then, isn’t to engage temptation with force of will, but to avoid temptations from the get-go or at least minimize exposure whenever possible.