“Whatever Our Souls Are Made Of” — a different way to keep resolutions

“You become as small as your controlling desire, as great as your dominant aspirations”

Why are resolutions so hard to keep?

As the new year is upon us, I’ve been thinking about this a good deal lately: why by two weeks, a month, or three months into the new year most people have jettisoned their resolutions and are right back where they were at the time they vowed “this year will be different.” In fact, the data here is more disheartening than you’d even think — 80% of people quit their New Year’s resolutions in the month of January. Ouch.

I wanted to approach it from a different angle. Or, the angle came to me when I was discussing a book, “In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, with the COO of my consulting firm, Anna Hicks. While I haven’t read the book, I am aware of one of its primary postulations from Dr. Peter Attia, a longevity MD who speaks a great deal about not just living long, but living well. Because, as I believe he would suggest, what would be the point of living to 100 years old if you are miserable every day?

That misery, incidentally, is a driving premise of the book. “We all experience pain, and we all turn to some form of addiction to deal with the pain.” I cheated and read the first chapter; that’s a direct quote. At first this may not seem believable — we either know someone who seemingly hits it so straight down the fairway that they couldn’t possibly escape pain with addictions, or ideally we are that person. We know ourselves.

But think deeper on it? Let’s say you don’t partake in drugs, drink alcohol, gamble, etc. There are plenty of other venues to escape in. How many times a day do you check your phone? The data would suggest every 6 minutes now for the average person who has one. 46% surveyed said they “could not live without” their smartphone — if that is not the very definition of addiction, then what is? Point being, to quote Gabor Mate, the author of the book:

“The need to regulate, to escape unbearable distress or unrest — addiction is a forlorn attempt to solve the human problem of pain.”

Or, per the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer: “Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.” So where is this going? Back to my conversation with Anna — I wondered aloud what it was I was addicted to, to which she said, “If I had to come up with a single thing, it would be self-improvement.”

Which made me stop to think. Not all addictions are bad, right? We can escape in healthy ways. So I consulted the literature. Sure enough, you can have healthy addictions that add to your life — that enhance it. And, whether Anna is right or not, I do have a number of healthy ways to escape. In fact, I track them every day — there are 10.

I’m not going to get into what each is, because mine shouldn’t be anyone else’s. But I’ll give examples: over 10,000 steps a day, learning something every day, writing each day, etc. Here’s a look at my tracking of what is essentially, “whatever I hope my soul to be made of.”

So what does this mean?
1. I’m far from perfect at this (and not just my dysgraphic handwriting).

2. Being perfect at 10 self-improvement agendas every day would be next to impossible, so it’s irrelevant to me; the point is I’m doing things healthy every day. On some days I’m doing many.

3. I’m “piggybacking.” That’s actually a psychological phenomenon for keeping resolutions. When I do one, I am motivated to do another.

4. I’m keeping specific tracking. Another proven resolution tactic.

5. Importantly — this isn’t my only page of tracking. I’m hooked and have been doing this for months now. The simple act of filling in a red mark is, literally, producing dopamine. I wrote about it here, and it is the key to staying motivated. Dopamine, it turns out, isn’t the neurotransmitter for pleasure. It’s the chemical of sustained effort.

6. Finally, most importantly, I added a final category. I grade each day. The lowest for the entire month was a B. So, I am doing very well — all because I became hooked on my resolutions. I can’t remember who once said, “You become as small as your controlling desire, as great as your dominant aspirations,” which is what this article is about. Embrace the dominant aspirations, and get hooked!

Happy 2021 and resolution keeping!

– Mike