Category: happiness

How to Make Sucessful New Year’s Resolutions

Why Do New Year’s Resolutions Fail? A Scientific Perspective

Why Do New Year’s Resolutions Fail? A Scientific Perspective

As the clock strikes midnight on December 31st, hundreds of millions worldwide enthusiastically embrace New Year’s resolutions. These promises are often made with the sincere intention to enhance well-being, happiness, and success. Although research shows that nearly 83% of resolutions can be challenging, there’s good news: adopting an informed and systematic approach can significantly empower you to take charge of your life and achieve your goals. Resolutions are a fantastic opportunity for personal growth, and incorporating meditation and mind training can wonderfully elevate the quality of your life. Let’s explore the main reasons why New Year’s resolutions might stumble and how nondual meditation and mindtraining can make a huge difference in your transformation.

Lack of Perseverance and Continuity

The vast majority of New Year’s resolutions are centered around the exciting beginnings or positive endings of activities and behaviors. In neuropsychology, we often refer to this as the ‘all or nothing’ mindset. While this approach sets high expectations for goals, embracing incremental improvements can be transformative, where each partial success is a step forward. In reality, reducing the amount of alcohol or junk food we consume is a significant victory worth celebrating. By building on this progress and viewing it as a triumph rather than a setback, we open ourselves up to the possibility of achieving our goals with confidence and enthusiasm.

The Psychology of Habits

At the heart of the issue is the psychology of habits. Habits are deeply ingrained behaviours that are hardwired into our brains through repeated actions and reinforced by the reward system. According to Dr. Wendy Wood, a psychology professor at the University of Southern California, about 40% of the actions people perform each day are habitual. Other research suggests that the mechanisms supporting ‘free will’ are complex and cannot be mediated by simplistic gaol-setting. Changing these deeply embedded habits requires significant effort and consistency, which is challenging for many. As such, supporting resolutions with habit-changing techniques like mind training and meditation will dramatically increase your chances of success.

Unrealistic Expectations

One of the primary reasons resolutions fail is that people set unrealistic goals, often unrelated to their actual abilities and motivation. Put simply most humans don’t learn enough from previous mistakes and continue to underestimate the challenge of change. Resolutions are best supported with a considered objective approach, maintained by ongoing commitment. New Year’s promises often lack specificity and attainability, making them overwhelming. For instance, resolving to “lose weight” without a concrete plan or achievable milestones can quickly lead to frustration and abandonment. Research shows that setting SMART goals—Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound—can significantly increase the likelihood of success.

Lack of Immediate Gratification (The Dopamine Problem)

Meditation and mindtraining can train humans in patience and perseverance. Humans are wired to seek immediate gratification, a concept deeply rooted in our evolutionary past and neurobiology. New Year’s resolutions often involve long-term goals, such as losing weight or saving money, which do not provide immediate rewards. This lack of instant gratification can demotivate individuals, causing them to revert to their old habits that offer quicker satisfaction. The brain’s reward system, which releases dopamine when we achieve something pleasurable, plays a crucial role here. Immediate rewards trigger this system effectively, whereas distant goals do not. Unless you understand that impulsive wishes can be mediated by mental training, goals and objectives are always at risk.

Willpower and Cognitive Load

Although an oversimplification, neuropsychologists claim willpower is like a muscle that can be exhausted. Some studies have shown that the more we use our willpower, the more it depletes, making it harder to maintain self-control over time. This concept, known as ego depletion, may mean that after a long day of resisting temptations, individuals are more likely to give in. Additionally, the cognitive load of modern life—with constant demands on our attention and decision-making—further drains our mental resources, leaving little energy for new habits. Nondual forms of meditation typically lead to a reduction in the mechanisms that exhaust mental capacity and the concept of ‘temptation’.

Environmental and Social Factors

Meditation and mindtraining are good methods for regulating our inner and outer worlds, aligning our aspirations with our lived conditions. Our environment and social circles greatly influence our behaviour. If someone resolves to quit smoking but is constantly surrounded by friends who smoke, their chances of success decrease significantly. Similarly, environments that do not support new habits—such as a household full of unhealthy snacks for someone trying to eat healthier—can sabotage resolutions.

Lack of a Concrete Plan

At its heart, traditional forms of meditation allow a systematic approach to mind and matter, aligning goals with behaviour. Many people make resolutions without a clear plan for achieving them. A study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology found that individuals who made explicit plans for their resolutions were 10 times more likely to succeed than those who did not. Planning involves breaking down goals into actionable steps, anticipating obstacles, and developing strategies to overcome them. Without such a plan, resolutions often remain vague aspirations.

Conclusion

The failure of New Year’s resolutions is a multifaceted issue rooted in the complexities of human psychology, behaviour, and the environment. By understanding these scientific explanations, individuals can better prepare to set realistic goals, create actionable plans, and foster supportive environments, increasing their chances of success. Remember, change is a gradual process, and persistence is key. Celebrate small victories along the way, and don’t be too hard on yourself if setbacks occur. After all, each day is an opportunity for a fresh start. Nondual meditation and mindtraining methods are among the most powerful tools we have to help shape behaviour and reach meaningful goals.

What is the Nondual View, and Why is it Important in Meditation?

A startling finding emerging from the groundbreaking Scientific History of Mindfulness is the failure of Western science to recognise the nondual nature of traditional forms of meditation. Experienced meditation practitioners may have been taught about the nondual view or nondual meditation methods, which are pivotal to many meditation traditions. However, most Westerners’ consciousness is dominated by explicitly dualistic frameworks. The ability of people rooted in a dualistic awareness, including scientists, to understand a nondual worldview is problematic, even if they have received instruction and training. One possible explanation for this problem is the concept of incommensurability found in Thomas Kuhn’s writings. A controversial term, incommensurability, describes how changing to alternative ways of knowing is problematic once we have been trained in a particular understanding of the world. Further, someone who is schooled in a specific understanding may not even know that they have been cognitively conditioned to see the world from one particular dualistic perspective.

A characteristic of the dualistic mind is that it believes its conscious experience is an objective reality. This misunderstanding is experienced by Western meditation scholars and scientists, even today. Many highly intelligent and well-intentioned academics make claims about the nature of traditional forms of meditation from a dualistic perspective without ever having recognised the role of nonduality in meditation methods. This problem is not restricted to modern materialistic societies but is present wherever people foster a ‘belief in self’ as an objective reality. Thus, many traditional meditation students train for years, or even decades, to appreciate that their consciousness can be either dual, nondual, or even an integration of the two.

Typically, humans flit between dual and nondual forms of consciousness without knowing or detecting the difference.  In this brief introduction, the critical thing to remember is that we all have access to dual and nondual ways of knowing; both are integral to the human experience. However, it is highly problematic to recognise and then cultivate a consistent nondual view without training and guidance. It is not possible to provide a comprehensive explanation of dual or nondual consciousness in this article, but I have written about these issues elsewhere.  So here, I will attempt to use simplified approximations to introduce this subject.

In a typical Western materialistic society like the UK today, most people spend significant time in dualistic consciousness.  We could characterise the dualistic state in many ways; as a starting point, let us simply regard it as the point of view where one believes, as truth, the conscious and subconscious impulses generated by our brain.  

We can all find examples of our irrational thoughts and baseless concerns that we recognise as meaningless. However, many of us accept unfounded opinions and erroneous perceptions as ‘reality’. While our thoughts and ideas often seem meaningful, the views of others can seem meaningless or even ridiculous. Without nondual awareness, our identity is partly made up of fabricated constructs with no reality other than what we attribute to them; I’d suggest this is the dominance of emotion over reasoning, although it is obviously an oversimplification. So, for example, thinking that others are responsible for your mental state (you make me angry) is usually an expression of dualism, as is the default belief that our wishes and goals are somehow more important than the wishes and goals of others. 

By contrast, a nondual view distinguishes between reliable mental phenomena and transient, unreliable thoughts and feelings. Once a stable and systematic nondual view is achieved, we can establish relative freedom in thinking, speaking and acting. This freedom is often associated with the happiness and stability observed in nondual practitioners. So, from a nondual perspective, we make the presumption that the thoughts and feelings of others may be just as important and meaningful as ours. A note of caution; the nondual view is typically achieved by abandoning limiting concepts, an exercise that usually requires a significant amount of time, effort and training. I will stop the preliminary definitions here for now and briefly discuss what these concepts mean for meditation practice.

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In traditional meditation, people often begin at the beginning; if they have a reliable teacher and methods and are diligent, they can progress.  However, until a practitioner realises which mental phenomena arising in their consciousness are transient and meaningless, all meditation can be seen as relative. That means your practice is relative to your mental state and other causes and conditions.  A practitioner with some modest experience of the nondual should be able to transcend belief in mundane phenomena, knowing their relative unimportance.  That is not to say that a nondual practitioner may have arrived at a transcendent mental state; it is simply that they understand the limitations of their own worldview.  That, in a nutshell, is my view of why the nondual is essential to progress beyond a preliminary stage in meditation practice.  Without nondual awareness, the inner world of our consciousness remains uncertain. While much Buddhist meditation is not explicitly nondual, it all, by its very nature, increases the ability of the student to understand nonduality. Nonduality is a central pillar in many spiritual and philosophical traditions, but it is mainly invisible to the psychological sciences; I wonder why…?

Book Review: Can we be happier? Evidence and ethics by Richard Layard (Penguin, 2020)

Happiness is one of the most important aspects of human consciousness, however psychological understanding is still at a preliminary stage.

What is happiness and how can we increase it?

In another week of challenging events, the task of reviewing any book on happiness offered a welcome contrast to depressing accounts of pandemic, politics and poverty. Not that Covid-19, economic decline and the threat from climate change are not important issues, but because the book title suggested solutions to many of the intractable problems we face. Indeed, Layard offers hope that ‘despite appearances, a new gentler culture is emerging’. However, opening use of the Royal Princes as commentators on the direction of the UK’s wellbeing is a strange choice. It’s not that William and Harry’s opinions don’t matter, but rather the extent to which the views of two of the most privileged men in Britain reflect the day-to-day experience of life for people in general.  But let’s not get off entirely on the wrong foot; there’s much to respect in Layard’s work generally. An opinion former in the economics of happiness, he writes and speaks extensively on the subject. And as a scientist and academic committed to researching the relationship between health and happiness, I wanted to be impressed; I wanted to share the vision. But unfortunately it didn’t happen.

In the book’s introductory road map, Layard explains the paths to greater happiness in simple terms. We inherit two genetic ‘traits’, altruism and selfishness, and by reducing selfishness and increasing altruism, we make the world a better place for ourselves and others. The omission of evidence to support this model was the core limitation of the work. I’m also concerned by the book’s tone that society’s happiness rests mainly on just one concept, ‘say no to selfishness’. There’s little acknowledgement of individual psychological differences, epigenetic limitations or the host of external factors that create variability in human behaviour. Several of the examples abandoned causality. So, while school is held to be more influential in a child’s happiness than their grades, Layard didn’t address the evidence linking education, income and privilege. Similarly, the correlations between poverty and the mental health of school-aged children were generally understated. Psychological sciences have frequently demonstrated the link between poverty and lifelong unhappiness. If you separate the conditions most likely to cause unhappiness (poverty), it may make scientific models seem more reliable, but this reductive approach doesn’t help us get to the root causes of why people are so desperately unhappy, to begin with.

After a set of controls are added, we document that both persistent levels of poverty and transitions into poverty are strongly associated with levels of and transitions into childhood mental health problems

Emla Fitzsimons et al. [2]

Who’s happiness?

Over 14 chapters Can we be happier? offers a view of how society might transform into a benevolent paternalistic state. It describes how each of us (parents, teachers, scientists, politicians, managers, economists, etc.) needs to act to support his (Layard’s) vision. Layard combines his manifesto for a kinder and happier society with a distinctive catalogue of happiness projects, a constellation of ideas originating from sources as diverse as the Dalai Lama and the World Economic Forum. These concepts are loosely grouped around several themes. One of the most persistent is that an increase in income accounts for a minuscule change in people’s experience of happiness (a maximum of two per cent). Leaving aside the scientific reliability of this claim, I’m unsure of its narrative function in a book based on the benefits of altruism. While almost all of us studying the science of meditation would agree materialism per se’ isn’t always correlated with happiness, the psychology suggests the effects of long term poverty significantly reduce our potential for positive physical and mental wellbeing.

Relationships between poverty and happiness?

Hundreds of citations from peer-reviewed scientific papers document essential work in the field of happiness and wellbeing. But the selective use of evidence combined with personal insights didn’t coalesce; there isn’t a coherent framework. The notion that we have two competing neural networks, one generous and the other self-centred, mediated primarily by choice, isn’t evidenced in the book. The available science illustrates much more complex relationships between selfish and unselfish behaviours.

The underlying neural circuitry differs between psychopaths and altruists with emotional processing being profoundly muted in psychopaths and significantly enhanced in altruists. But both groups are characterized by the reward system of the brain shaping behavior. Instead of rigid assignment of human nature as being “universally selfish” or “universally good,” both characterizations are partial truths based on the segments of the selfish–selfless spectrum being examined.

James W.H. Sonne and Don M. Gash [3]

As a neuropsychologist, I have some concerns about using psychometrics to infer universal brain function and structure, no matter how well-intentioned the project is. Layard is a knowledgeable and credible source; his motivation is to be praised. But by stretching his field of expertise to cover both Buddhism and neuroscience, his thesis becomes unstable. The reader’s main difficulties arise in understanding the vision and how the multiverse of compassionate strands form a unified cord.

Yet the mindfulness movement and empirical evidence supporting it have not gone without criticism. Misinformation and poor methodology associated with past studies of mindfulness may lead public consumers to be harmed, misled, and disappointed

Nicholas T. Van Dam and others [4]

Even in popular science, I like to see arguments for and against a hypothesis, particularly in areas of human behaviour as complex as happiness. That’s what separates evidence-led from opinion-led claims. Testing our ideas is one way to increase both our knowledge and the reliability of our thinking. But Layard fails to indicate the difference between scientifically reliable and speculative concepts. His use of contested experimental evidence lacked contrast or clarification. In extolling the virtues of mindfulness meditation, the widespread critical concerns of the scientific community are absent.

Poverty, education and happiness

Throughout the book, Layard uses mindfulness as an example of an approach able to support the (his) happiness revolution. But by acknowledging criticisms that mindfulness may not generate altruism, Layard creates an impasse that undermines his central claim. The reader is left in limbo by the failure to establish a scientific link between mindfulness – altruism – happiness. By the book’s end, it is still no clearer (scientifically) if mindfulness training might lead to increased or reduced happiness, and if so, how? Similarly, the importance of positive psychology to health and wellbeing is highlighted. Yet, there is no mention of the extensive body of self-compassion research that promotes self-care as a route to happiness. You don’t have to be a scientist to see the potential confusion if altruism and self-compassion lead to increased happiness. I’m not an opponent of secular mindfulness nor positive psychology, but I don’t think the selective use of evidence can be the foundation for a new, kinder era.

To promote the use of mindfulness beyond its evidential basis risks stalling the progress of this crucial human technology further. There is currently an opportunity to reset the trajectory of meditation research towards new productive areas and not repeat the mistakes from the 1970s and the 1980s. But for this to happen, we need to filter out aspirational science. Over the last fifty years, we have seen that merging the theoretical frameworks of Buddhism and psychological science may cause ontological limitations. If we are serious about a compassionate revolution, we must hold our nerve and face the limits of our current understandings. It’s over a century since Paul Carus embarked on his project to combine the best of psychology and spirituality in a monistic philosophy. History shows us that this approach may not best support the scientific method.

The lack of references to the historical development of the science of meditation is a sad omission. An analysis of the foundational studies in the field has much to tell us about secular meditation’s strengths and weaknesses. The range of sources used in Can we be happier? is commendable, but understanding their overarching theoretical frameworks is challenging. But to bring people together to support the goal of collective altruism there must be a clearer vision. Layard offers insights that signpost opportunities and challenges; unfortunately, contradictions diffuses his passion. He fails to establish the scientific evidence for his central argument that humans have trait altruism and selfishness, mediated primarily by will alone. Instead, the author presents us with a highly personal view of individuals and society. The book is dedicated to the Dalai Lama, and Buddhist ideas are present throughout the text. It’s a given that H.H. The Dalai Lama is an exemplar of kindness and compassion. But what is the conceptual relationship between ordained Buddhist monks and the dominant economic paradigms which limit happiness in the UK? If Buddhism is part of Layard’s strategy for happiness, he needs to share his thoughts of which Buddhist schools, teachers, ontologies and epistemologies he thinks will help. Buddhism isn’t one set of ideas or practices, rather like views on happiness it’s a rich spectrum.

How well does psychology measure happiness?

The title of the book, Can we be happier? reveals the underlying uncertainty present in the text. We can, of course, be happier; relative happiness is a state mediated by a range of constantly shifting internal and external phenomena. A better focus for this project would have been ‘What I know about happiness’. Millions share Layard’s wish that people become happier through altruism. His motivation and commitment to the eradication of ‘misery’ are impressive. But throughout my reading, I was longing for more voices of people, rather than statistical aggregations of misery to emerge from the data. We are not yet at the point where science can deliver absolute truths regarding the human condition or consciousness. A key element in the training of Tibetan Buddhists and contemporary psychologists is the recognition that our own opinions are relative. As such, reflexivity (reflectivity) and a balanced approach to knowledge creation are essential qualities for scientists and those who would use science for the common good. I sincerely hope that Layard’s ‘compassionate dawn’ is coming. However, we don’t need to wait; each of us can be inspired by the sentiments of such a work, we can be altruistic and strive for a more compassionate society today. But the book left me concerned that we still don’t know enough about brain training (meditation) for it to be recruited by social policy as a panacea.

This review was first published on the Critical Mindfulness website in October 2020.

Bibliography

[1] Richard Layard, Can We Be Happier? Evidence and Ethics (London: Penguin, 2020). p1

[2] Emla Fitzsimons and others, ‘Poverty Dynamics and Parental Mental Health: Determinants of Childhood Mental Health in the U.K.’, Social Science and Medicine, 175 (2017), 43–51. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2016.12.040

[3] James W.H. Sonne and Don M. Gash, ‘Psychopathy to Altruism: Neurobiology of the Selfish-Selfless Spectrum’, Frontiers in Psychology (Frontiers Media S.A., 2018), 575

[4] Nicholas T. Van Dam and others, ‘Mind the Hype: A Critical Evaluation and Prescriptive Agenda for Research on Mindfulness and Meditation’, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 13.1 (2018), 36–61. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1745691617709589