The New Year Plans of mice and men by Crawford Hollingworth

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Crawford Hollingworth, founder, The Behavioural Architects, provides some top tips on how we can make our New Year’s resolutions work.

It is a known fact that three out of four New Year’s resolutions typically fail. But help is on hand, you can use some of those clever insights into how our brains are wired to make success a little more likely.

Play to the commitment bias and loss aversion

Accept that your willpower is not perfect and make use of commitment devices (see earlier article – Unleashing the Power of Commitment). A great example of using commitment devices successfully to make sure we stay true to our exercise programme is Gym-Pact in the US. Set up by students following a class on behavioural economics, Gym-Pact helps struggling gym users exercise regularly by asking them to make a commitment to go to the gym a number of days a week. Recognising that most gym goers suffered from time inconsistency and self-control problems (wanting to get fit…but not today) they use commitment bias and loss aversion (the money gym users have committed to their membership) to increase gym attendance. The clever part is that it only charges you when you miss appointments you committed yourself to. The organisation is not a gym in itself, but it partners with gyms based in the Boston area to help their users attend. (gym-pact.com/).

stickk.com uses a similar approach but can be applied to any daunting ambition; from dieting to studying, to exercise, using a four stage process: Select your goal, Set the stakes, Get a referee, Add friends for support.

Or you could harness the commitment bias more immediately simply by making your resolutions public – tell your friends, write a note on the fridge – or teaming up with a partner and committing to do something together – that way you’re each responsible for each other’s commitment.

Change your environment or the context in which the behaviour you want to change takes place

Research has found that making healthy choices more available can very quickly change our behaviour. Jason Riis, a Professor of Marketing at Harvard Business School and colleagues tested two components of choice architecture in a large hospital cafeteria in Boston. Phase 1 was a 3-month colour-coded labelling intervention (red= “unhealthy”; yellow= “less healthy”; green= “healthy”). Phase 2 added a 3-month choice architecture intervention which increased the visibility and convenience of some green “healthy” items. For example, they put bottles of water ‘everywhere’ and rearranged snack displays. Analysis of over one million cash register receipts revealed increases in the purchase of healthy products and decreases in the purchase of unhealthy products at both phases of the intervention. The largest changes were in the beverage category, where sales of unhealthy beverages decreased by 25% across both phases.

Until our schools, workplaces and hospitals start redesigning canteens to promote healthier eating, there’s not much we can change in the outside world, but we can decide more consciously where temptation is likely to be and avoid those places (what we call hot emotional zones) and more directly at home we can make fruit our easy access snacks and hide the chocolate.

Building a resolution into a habit

The goal is to get to a point when we don’t even need to think about doing it, it just happens, as part of our autopilot or subconscious state. But how do we go about creating a habit? Researchers are avidly looking into what creates a habit – for simple things, habits can be formed in a matter of days. Other more complex activities may take a few months.

We recently took part in B.J. Fogg’s 3 tiny habits program at Stanford (‘When you know how to create tiny habits, you can change your life forever’) which gave us a week to create three small habits. Fogg describes himself as a social scientist and runs the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford. He says there are 3 stages to forming a habit:

Option A: Have an epiphany
Option B: Change your context (what surrounds you)
Option C: Take baby steps

Typically Fogg focuses on a few key points such as introducing your new habit after an existing habit. This way the existing habit triggers your memory to perform the new habit. My colleague (whose tiny habit plan was to spend a few minutes on her wobble board each day – I’m told it improves core stability and ankle strength) chose to integrate the wobble board activity immediately after drying her hair each morning. The second key to success is to make the habit easy to perform perhaps by altering your environment to prompt or discourage the lazy in you – my colleague placed her wobble board next to her hairdryer. The third element was to celebrate just remembering to do the action – this signifies that it has begun to become a habit.

A little applied BE for us all to start the New Year. And sometimes, as we know, understanding how BE can work in our own lives will help us to put these powerful brain insights to work on those we might seek to influence.

Crawford Hollingworth, founder, The Behavioural Architects.

Read more from Crawford here.

References
[1]http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/dec/28/new-years-resolutions-doomed-failure
[1]Thorndike, Anne, LilianSonnenberg, Jason Riis, Susan Barraclough, and Doug Levy. “A 2-phase Labeling and Choice Architecture Intervention to Improve Healthy Food and Beverage Choice.” American Journal of Public Health (forthcoming).