Why our ‘New Year Resolution’ to exercise everyday fails often: A behavioural economics perspective!

If you are like me in late 20s, chances are you might have spent considerable number of New Year Eves in the legendary 20s decade strengthening your resolve that as the first Sun of the new year rises , you will un-failingly get up ( read drag out) from your comfy bed on that cold winter morning, would put on the those awesome headphones playing the ‘most motivational songs’ that will give you the adrenaline rush as you jog your way to the nearest running track!

 All this while, you gleefully stuff yourself with the tastiest ‘Pav bhaji’ that mommy made !

 But then all of us are quite familiar that how that motivational imagery of us running on tracks everyday to get a perfect physique is replaced by the mundane struggle of pulling the bed covers, hitting the snooze button and going back to sleep and waking up later with the realization that ‘we are way past the jog-time now, let it be tomorrow’ and tomorrow never comes !

This situation extends to our innumerable day to day habits: binge eating, binge watching, attempting to wake up early, trying to save every month, impulsive shopping! We resolve to cut down on our ‘not-so-healthy’ habits but fail to do so!

 We can point out varied reasons that are highly generic for ‘fallibility of our resolutions’: lack of determination , motivation or general lack of self control and succumbing to temptation which leads to faulty decision making.

However, the interesting part remains that do we end up taking the decisions that are ' 'not the best' and manage to compromise ‘rationality ‘ of We, the humans that all economics textbooks swear by!

 While the rational choice would be go for exercise daily, we usually end up doing the opposite! This again applies to all situations where we know what’s the right thing to do that will maximize our welfare, we end up doing the opposite. Why do we suffer from lack of self control!

 ‘Lack of self control’ arises mostly in the situations where our actions and its consequences are separated in time.

The repercussion of most of our day to day actions are not visible/felt immediately or in near term but might come later..in middle or long term. These are the decisions that put to test our determination to exercise self control.

 And because sub-consciously we realize that we are not going to see the consequences of ‘not taking the most rational decision’ anytime soon, we tend to go for the alternative (and adverse decision). For instance, in the above example, the effects of ‘not’ exercising in youth are not going to be felt before middle age or past that. The same applies to effect of binge eating and splurging money impulsively.

 This is in contrast to several other tiny decisions we take in our daily lives that do not require any self control: For instance, which series to start seeing next on Netflix, the choice of songs on your playlist.

 The ‘lack of self control’ are attempted to be partially or fully corrected using several kinds of nudges ( to be discussed in subsequent post) that help us bridge the gap between ‘ what we are suppose to do and what we actually do’ and have better control on the choices we make.

The nudges gain importance because simply telling people ‘ the right thing to do’ does not work. For instance, people forget to have an intake of enough water in a day to keep them well hydrated, even though they are told and they understand the importance of the same. It was found that rather than simply telling people to have people wasn’t as effective as increasing the number of water coolers in workspace, which nudged people to have more frequent trips to water coolers! Also, As discussed by Richard Thaler in his book ‘Nudge’, ‘the alarm clock by the name of ‘Clocky’ proves to be more effective in waking up people than the usual alarm clocks. Clocky runs around once it starts ringing forcing you to get out from bed and chase it rather than just hitting the snooze button and going back to sleep!

 The use of ‘nudges’ has made ‘gaining self control’ relatively easier. But gaining self control is only possibly if we identify and acknowledge the decision/ situations in our day to day life where we lack or lose control.