✍🏻 This New Year, Beware of 'False Hope Syndrome'
On the power of setting modest goals and a one-word theme
Hello, my friend!
In today’s newsletter, we shall kickstart your New Year plans! I’ve got two resources. The first explains why it’s so damn hard to make our resolutions stick (And it’s not because people are lazy or unmotivated!). The second proposes: What if goal-setting isn’t what you need?
Let’s get to it.
Could Your New Spirit Be Working Against You and Your Resolutions?
“It’s January 1”, my former boss said. “So what?”
Many people revel in the high of yet another new year — but not him. Despite being an optimistic, goal-driven person, he didn’t bother with grand resolutions. He also questioned the extraordinary hype around self-change — and perhaps for good reason.
It’s a well-known statistic that approximately 80% of resolutions fail by February. Last year, fitness app Strava ran the data on 800 million activities and predicted that people quit their goals as early as January 19 — a date the company coined “Quitter’s Day.” Indeed, what is the fuss about making resolutions if it seems to be a lost cause for many?
It turns out that all that fuss may very well be the cause of our downfall. According to University of Toronto researcher J Polivy, when people dream about self-change, that resolve “appears to promote a sense of control, which may contribute to elevated expectations of success.”
Enter the phenomenon called the false hope syndrome. Polivy explains that as admirable it may be to dream big and aspire to change, such high hopes often lead us to ask too much from ourselves and too soon, or to underestimate how tough the journey will be. “When the alteration is too difficult, or one’s expectations are out of line with what can be achieved, self-confidence may become overconfidence, leading from hope to false hope.” And when one fails to meet those unreasonable expectations, “the individual is likely to feel frustrated and despondent, and to give up.”
False hope syndrome strikes the hardest around the New Year. When making resolutions, we’re inclined to think, “Go big or go home.”
Exhibit A: I had very ambitious writing goals coming into 2021. I told myself I’d publish around 200 stories and gain 3,000 more followers. Broken down, that would be 16 stories and 250 followers per month. I even prepared a spreadsheet to track my progress. As I write this, the month is November, I am nowhere near those numbers and — as research has rubbed in my face — have not opened the spreadsheet since February.
I felt so dejected about my progress (or lack thereof) and felt like there was no one else to blame but myself. Thanks to the false hope syndrome, however, I can now see a kinder perspective: When we fail to live up to our resolutions, it’s rarely because of lack of willpower or effort, but because the bar was just too high in the first place.
Maybe we’re hard-pressed to see that especially when we succeed in our early efforts. I do remember, in those first few weeks, that I was on fire with my writing.
Maybe you can manage to lay off all those sweets for a couple of days. Or go for an early morning run for five days straight. Or survive a week with zero social media usage. You break up with what’s not good for you only to be greeted too soon by “relapses” (We’re talking about habits, by the way).
You miss all the chocolate that you swore off. A one-day pass from jogging becomes a week-long M.I.A case. A supposed 30-minute social media check turns into three hours of doom-scrolling.
It’s easy to operate at the start when the optimism is high. But as Polivy explains, those positive feelings “tend to dissipate with the vicissitudes of actually working to effect the change.” Following through on our goals, then, becomes harder with every passing day.
So how do we overcome this false hope syndrome? How do we refrain from yo-yo-ing between fleeting enthusiasm and damaged self-esteem, and finally live up to that “new year, new me” promise?
Going back to my former boss, I remember the time I asked him how he manages different people so well. How does he stay so patient?
“I do my best to gauge where a person is and what he can do,” he told me. “Then I adjust my expectations accordingly.”
His answer struck me because it wasn’t so much about lowering expectations but being able to meet someone where he’s at. It was about kindness, acceptance, and a genuine intention to grow and build that person up.
I think we’d be better at making resolutions if we treated ourselves the same way. To draw the line between real hope and false hope, we need to be honest with our baseline and work from there. As Polivy concludes, “Real hope of changing requires that our skills match our goals.”
Apart from that, I’ve also learned that it’s important to lean into incremental efforts. There’s always this notion that if something is too easy or too modest, it might not make any difference. We’re led to believe that the bigger the stride, the faster you’ll go. And the study mentions this, too. In setting expectations, people’s evaluations tend to “exceed what is possible, and lead them to reject more modest, achievable goals.”
So perhaps it’s time to change the discussion. What if “modest, achievable goals” were a way of playing it smart? As habit expert James Clear says, “Rather than trying to do something amazing from the beginning, start small and gradually improve”.
Between a daily walk of 15 minutes or 30 minutes, an intermittent fast of 12 hours or 16 hours, a daily word count of 500 words or 1,000 words, a year-end reading goal of 12 books or 24 books, or a list of five resolutions or ten, know that there is nothing wrong with committing to the “easier” goal. As Clear points out:
The less friction you face, the easier it is for your stronger self to emerge. The idea behind making it easy is not to only do easy things. The idea is to make it as easy as possible in the moment to do things that payoff in the long run.
365 days? That’s a pretty long run. So to see our resolutions through, modesty may be our best bet. Setting modest goals doesn’t mean settling or aiming too low. If anything, it’s proof that you have the courage to meet yourself where you’re at, and know that the only plan that works is the one that’s actionable and sustainable. The false hope syndrome reveals: Setting yourself up for success could just be a matter of not setting yourself up for failure.
By all means, feel the New Year spirit. Envision and hope for better things for yourself. But know that you don’t have to keep falling short of your expectations like in the past. If you find that your January 1 self is only slightly better than your December 31 self, know that you are on track. And that that is enough.
This New Year, choose realistic over radical resolutions. Choose real hope and realizable change.
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You Don’t Need a Goal, You Need a Theme
Let’s admit it: Goals are intimidating. And, as my friend and author Niklas Goke wrote, “Until we reach them, all goals do is exert pressure from afar. Even worse, when we finally do achieve them, they disappear.” Then off we go looking for the next big thing to hinge our happiness on.
What if there’s a better system? What if there’s a less rigid, more compassionate, and perhaps even more compelling way to go about our year?
Nik’s proposal is simple, elegant, and powerful:
If you allow your level of fulfillment to be a by-product of your goals, you’ll spend a lot of time feeling unfulfilled. But there’s a way to reverse this dynamic: having a theme.
A theme is a baseline ideal, one that you use to guide your actions and decisions. It isn’t worried about tomorrow, nor does it care what happened yesterday. With a theme, all that matters is what you do today. It turns happiness into an attainable, daily standard that’s based on your behavior, not your accomplishments.
The beauty of a one-word theme is that it allows you to compare all your thoughts, actions, and decisions against a single, universal standard. All you need is to ask a simple question: “Is this aligned with my theme?”
Nik is one of the greatest writers on Medium. He wrote two articles on this topic. And I highly recommend you read both in time for the New Year.
That’s it for this weekend! We’re halfway through December. There is time to think. To plan. To solidify your vision of a meaningful 2022. That’s all it takes to…
Create the good life,
❤️ Ria