The Daily Stoic - BONUS | Why Your New Year’s Resolutions Always Fail (with Dr. Rangan Chatterjee)

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a stoic-inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women help you learn from them. to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visitdailystoic.com. they're like, I want to be a different person in 2025, or I want to be a better person. I want to be closer to the person I know I'm capable of being.

Starting point is 00:01:07 How do you think about resolutions? Because the reality is a lot of people have that sensation, that feeling, that desire, and then most resolutions go nowhere and people spend another year as exactly the same person. I mean, I spent a long time thinking about this, because why is it that, you know, depending which research study you read, 80 to 90% in years resolutions have fallen by the wayside by the start of February, right? Okay. And I've got 23 years of clinical experience. So I've seen tens of thousands of patients. So I kind of feel I've got a good steer, certainly from my own experience of what I've seen. I think there's a few things that people get wrong. Okay. I think

Starting point is 00:01:46 they try and make it too big too quickly, which I have seen people do that. Yeah. Generally speaking, the people who can transform their lives overnight, they've generally had some really, really big life experience, a divorce, a bereavement, they've lost the house. Something big, yeah, you can do it. But if you don't have that driving you, I think if you make it too big, you're never going to make it less in the long term. Right. So there's a couple of things to say about these resolutions, right? So one thing I don't think people understand enough is that every single behavior in our life serves a role. Too often we try and change the behavior without understanding the role it plays in our life. So I'll give you really practical example.

Starting point is 00:02:31 If your alcohol consumption is your way of managing stress, you can white-knuckle it for the first two or three weeks of January, and you will stop. And you'll think, yeah, I've got more energy, I'm sleeping better. Great, great, great. I have no problem with that. But if it's your way in managing stress, the only way you'll change it in the long term is by one of two things. Either the amount of stress in your life has to change, so then you'll no longer need the alcohol, or you need an alternative behavior to alcohol to help you manage the stress. It sounds so obvious, Ryan, when I put it like that. But most people, in my experience, are caught up in their lives and they're focused too

Starting point is 00:03:13 much on the behavior instead of being focused on what role does behavior play. And so I've comes to the conclusion that, and this is really one of the primary thesis is in Make Change that last, my new book, is this idea that it's not necessarily the behavior you need to focus on. It's the energy behind the behavior. What's it doing for you? Why are you doing it? And the other way I look at it for New Year's resolutions is all behaviors, I believe, come from either love or fear, right? At their core. So if you feel bad about who you are, you're consumed with guilt and shame and jealousy and envy, or whatever it might be, these are all things that come from the energy of fear. If your changes are coming from that kind of energy, I don't think they're going to last in

Starting point is 00:04:01 the long term because you're trying to overcome, like the behavior is in conflicts with who you consider yourself to be. This was me a few years ago, right? So I would say, right, this year, I'm going to meditate. And I'd do 20 minutes of meditation every morning until like the 16th of January. Then I'll miss a day because work gets busy and I'd beat myself up in my head. Negative self-talk. I'd be wrong and you couldn't do it because you're this year. You know, you're a loser. I used to have a really negative inner voice. I've completely changed that over the years with these kind of intentional practices. And now I find behavior change really, really simple because I've focused on the underlying energies behind that behavior

Starting point is 00:04:45 change. And one of the things I try to kind of address in this book, Ryan, is I'm a doctor, right? So through the lens of health, I think we're living in a world where we've got more information than ever before, more health podcasts, more health books, more blogs, whatever it might be. But why despite all this increase in information and knowledge is it not translating to better health outcomes? We know what we should. Most of us know what we should. do or not do. Exactly. So, you know, I really tried hard with this book's going, no, no, no, there's a lot of what we should be doing out there. I've written books on what we should be doing. This book addresses the why. Why are we still doing the things that we know are harming us?

Starting point is 00:05:27 And I think a lot of it is internal. It comes to our internal world. And people don't want to go there, but that's where the gold is. It's funny. So every year for Daily Stoke, we do this thing. We call it The Daily Stoic New Year, New Year challenge. That's like 21 days of stoic-inspired challenges. It's different every year, but it's just a bunch of cool stoic practices. The idea is, like, one or two will stick with someone and they'll take it through the year. One will get them to think about something differently. But it's funny, like, we'll start talking about it in early December.

Starting point is 00:05:57 The first day you announce it, a bunch of people sign up. Second time you announce a bunch of people sign up. And then it sort of dips, and then it starts on January 1st. but like the second biggest sign-up day is always like January 2nd. So like people want to change, like at some level they heard about this. They want to change. And then what we do, I think this is the most insidious part of what gets in the way of so much what we're capable of doing is we go, okay, I'm going to do it tomorrow.

Starting point is 00:06:29 They go, okay, that starts on January 1st. So that's a couple weeks from now. So in a couple weeks from now, I'll get serious about. thinking about signing up, and then I'll miss it, like, which is the Stoics talk about, about how we know what we need to do, but then we say, we tell ourselves this huge lie, which is like, I'll do it in the morning. I'll do it after this. I'll do it when things calm down. By just moving the timeline up a little bit, we let ourselves out the hook, and then most of us don't do it. I completely agree. It's what I've seen in patience for years.

Starting point is 00:07:00 It's always next week, or next Monday, or next month. When the kids are older. Yeah, it starts today. So another five minute practice I try and do each day is what my wife and I call the five minute tea ritual. Like many people, if you're not intentional about it, you can live in the same house, but you get so busy with work and the children and you're like passing ships. Yeah. Right. So a few years ago, we decided, yeah, listen, yeah, life gets busy from time to time, but we really need to intentionally focus on our relationship. So we have this practice called the five minute tea ritual. every night when the kids were younger and we still try and do it now

Starting point is 00:07:37 when they've gone to bed before we do anything else we come to the kitchen we make a pot of minty so non-caffeinated and it's not the rule the practice is that for five minutes we catch up

Starting point is 00:07:51 right so it's only five minutes is the requirement so we're just going to ask each other about our days instead of we got to get a babysitter we're going to book a restaurant reservation you make it too big and then you're like

Starting point is 00:08:03 We can't do it this way. Yeah. And it's like, before you know, it's a few months before you did anything. And what's really interesting is, and I think this builds on this five-minute action each day principle that we're talking about, it's not that some days those five minutes don't become 30 minutes or an hour. More often than not. More often than not.

Starting point is 00:08:19 They do because it's actually, oh, this is much more fun than going on Netflix or YouTube, whatever it might be. It's like, oh, this is, you know, this is why I married you, right? We actually want to spend time together. Wait, we like each other? Yeah. But some days, one of us to say actually is just. going to be five minutes a day, like I've actually got a few emails to do or whatever it might

Starting point is 00:08:37 be. Whenever we've felt, either one of us that, oh, we're too busy and it's been a few days without that practice, it's really interesting. You can feel it in our relationship. The niggles, the small things start to bother us. There's less intimacy. There's less connection. But when we are quite disciplined about the five minute tea ritual, everything else in our relationship and therefore our lives and our health starts to get better. Right. And so I'm a huge fan of these small things that we do consistently. I have found time and time again with me and with thousands of my patients,

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Starting point is 00:11:51 loved ones, and decor to celebrate the holidays for way less. Head to Wayfair.com right now to shop all things home. W-A-Y-F-A-I-R.com, Wayfair, every style, every home. I mean, there's a writing rule of two crappy pages a day. Yeah. It seems like the opposite of how you would get good writing to set a goal to do bad writing. But what it's doing is it's dramatically lowering the stakes. It's making it attainable. And it's actually hard to do crappy pages. So, but the idea is you got to do crappy pages. and to do great pages, they share one similarity, which is that you have to show up. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:12:32 And so by lowering the stakes, you can create the room to create positive momentum. And then the other thing, which I think is a rule we don't, or I guess a factor, a fact of life we don't talk about enough, which is I think quantity is a way to get to quality. Yeah, yeah. So it's like, let's say every day for a month, you sit down with your spouse and you have five minutes. A lot of those are going to be five minutes of nothingness.

Starting point is 00:12:57 but one of those or a handful of those are really going to be significant, which you only could have had by having the larger number, right? And so the more you sit down and do the thing, what you're doing is increasing your chances of having those really transcendent days. And so, but people focus on like, you know what? Like for writing, they're like, I'm going to rent a cabin. I'm going to go there and I'm going to have two great weeks in a row. No, you're not. First you're not going to do it. Yeah. And then second, like, you're going to have five of those days be crappy. And as a result, like, you're not going to return with the things that you need it. So it's, it's more about the day-to-dayness, the consistency and the quantity that gets you the quality.

Starting point is 00:13:39 You see this with health, right? So let's use the example of working out, which is a desire that many people have at all times, but particularly at the new year, right? It's like, I want to move my body more. I'm spending too much time at the desk. People start to get, paralyzed with choice, right? Oh, what, you know, I'm going to run. I'm going to do yoga. I'm going to do. I'm going to do. What is that I'm going to do? And I've had patients before where they've literally got angina pains in their heart. We talk about physical activity. A month later, they're still coming back saying, hey, Dodger, I can't decide which one to do, right? And I understand that. I have sympathy. But the point is, frankly, any of them are going to help you.

Starting point is 00:14:18 They could just walked here, and that would have solved you. And so through the lens of my five-minute strength workout. People say, what, do you do the same thing every day? Actually, for many years, I did. Because if you have to decide every morning, oh, what am I going to do today? That's procrastination. That's choice. That leads to indecision and in action. And we know this in business, right? In the business world, when Amazon moved to one-click ordering about 10 years ago or so, estimates say their profits went up by $300 million a year. Because back then, I don't know if you can remember this, but there were four or five steps to take before you could purchase.

Starting point is 00:15:02 You have to confirm order, put in your car details on a news screen. There's three or four sets. Each time you have another option, it's a reason that you can pull out of the behavior. And so the reason we brush our teeth each night, well, one of the reasons is because it's the same action every day. On Tuesday, evening, we don't go, you know what, I brushed yesterday. Yeah. Let me do something different today. I'm going to floss today. And then on Wednesday, we don't go, I brush and I'm just going to rinse today. We don't do that. We know. If you had to assemble the toothbrush, you had to unpackage it, if you had to make the toothpaste. Wouldn't do it. Yeah, right. And so that's why my dumbbell and kettlebell lives in my kitchen. My cafeteria is there. It all works together. It is so easy. I can barely not do it. Now, going out to news resolutions, there's another, I think, for me, it's a big idea that I don't think we're talking

Starting point is 00:15:50 about enough, right? And I think it is a way of connecting a lot of your writings and practices with health, which, and I think sometimes people don't see the connection, right? So, I believe that a lot of the reason why we can't make changes that last is because we don't understand the internal drivers that are leading us to those practices. Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening. to the Daily Stoag podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you.

Starting point is 00:16:26 It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it, and this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you. Hey, it's Ryan. I try not to make too many puns on my last name because I've been hearing it my whole life. But if you want to give a holiday gift of me, Ryan Holiday, and the Daily Stoic, well, you can. We have a special offer. If you want to give Daily Stoic premium as a gift, you can do that.

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The Daily Stoic - BONUS | Why Your New Year’s Resolutions Always Fail (with Dr. Rangan Chatterjee)

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