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https://www.raptitude.com/2022/03/you-dont-need-a-promise-you-need-a-plan/
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I sleep better when I don’t eat snacks after dinner, especially junky carbohydrates, so last week when I visited a friend’s house I made a specific resolution to decline all such snacks.
Sure enough, as though the scene was a moral fable I had written myself, I was at one point handed an open bag of Doritos. I then watched myself pull out a handful of chips and start eating them, while making a resolution for next time.
Later, when the Doritos were reduced to crumbly fragments barely worth fishing out of the bag, I reflected on what had gone wrong, and remembered something I discovered years ago about resolutions but forget constantly.
If aliens were to visit earth and observe us living our lives, perhaps what would baffle them most about our species is not our struggle to co-operate with each other, but our struggle to co-operate with our own selves. You’d think a sentient organism should at a minimum be able adhere to its own decisions — to leave in time to catch the early bus, to do the lunch dishes right after lunch, to refrain from eating the entire sleeve of Oreos, especially after making explicit vows to do precisely those things because they make perfect sense.
For whatever evolutionary reasons, part of the game of being human is to wrangle ourselves into acting out the choices we’ve already determined are the right ones, and the resolution is our first-order tool for doing that. You make a promise to yourself – whatever that means exactly — that you will indeed do the thing you worry you won’t do. I will start the term paper the day after it’s assigned. I will not read the comments beneath news articles. I will wave away the Doritos bowl when it comes around.
There may be people for whom these sorts of bare resolutions do work reliably, and I assume these people become astronauts, pro athletes, and heads of state. For the rest of us, the resolution is a comically ineffective tool for changing course.
Resolutions are kind of pathetic if you think about how they’re supposed to work. We fear that we won’t act wisely when the time comes, often because we’ve just let ourselves down, so we simply assure ourselves that we will act wisely next time, and we mean it. This is more a gesture of hope than anything — that a moment of gathered resolve and earnest vows now will somehow cause us to possess the necessary wisdom and discipline later, in some future moment of truth when that promise is tested. The resolution is an attempt to control our future selves from the present, by simple decree.
However, the Future Self has its own feelings and concerns, and it will conduct itself as it sees fit. If we have any direct control over whether we keep a given self-promise, it is only in that sole Moment of Truth, when the choice is finally made for real – the moment the crinkly blue Oreo package is being slid over to you, or the moment you begin to contemplate postponing today’s run. Resolve can only be exercised there, in the Moment of Truth itself. If it’s not present then, it doesn’t matter how much of it you had earlier.
That’s good news, because it makes the challenge a lot smaller. Since the resolve only needs to be applied at and around that one decisive moment, you can focus on being ready for that moment. You don’t have to depend on willing yourself to become a permanently better and stronger person as of January 1st or Monday morning or this very minute.
Instead of harnessing your guilt and frustration to create a spontaneous personal transformation, you can play a different game, one which can actually be won: learning to recognize the approach of the Moment of Truth, and executing a simple plan to take Action B at that moment rather than the usual Action A.
Action A is the reflexive, habitual response – to grab the chips, to argue with the internet trolls – and it might always be the easiest thing in the world. But if you know you’re in the Moment of Truth, and you have an alternative move prepared, that alternative move can be pretty easy too – to say “No thanks” and go get a glass of water, or to click the browser tab closed and stand up.
This simple strategy of replacing a reflexive action with a more conscious and empowering one, is the way human beings train for any skill or activity. For example:
In rock climbing: When you want to pull with your arms, try pushing with your legs.
In chess: When you see a good move and you want to make it, try looking for a better one first.
In meditation: When you feel discomfort and you want to get rid of it, try allowing it to be there.
That’s what all training amounts to, as far as I can tell — conditioning ourselves to take a more effective action at a certain moment than the impulsive one we start out doing.
Imagine if, in the above examples, your improvement strategy was to will yourself to exert more arm strength, to think up only the best chess moves the first time, or to eliminate all discomfort while you meditate. You’d never get anywhere in these pursuits, no matter how many vows you made.
Come to think of it, when I look back on my personal triumphs, I’m not sure any of them were precipitated by an earnest moral appeal to myself to become better. They were all a matter of discovering a better way to respond to a recurring problem.
And it always feels funny at first. Action B – the new, more effective way of responding to a particular moment — always starts out feeling unintuitive, and Action A starts out feeling so compelling it’s hard not to do it. But each instance of doing B over A reverses this difference a bit. The game is in recognizing the signs that the Moment of Truth is approaching, and knowing the new move you’re going to make when it arrives.
My snacks-related moment of truth returned the other night, and my new move was to decline the chips, stand up, and go get myself a glass of water. It was easy to pull off this move because I had it ready.
Best of all, making this move (or not making it, had I forgotten) had nothing to do with becoming a better person. It wasn’t a victory of the angel on my shoulder over the devil on the other—it was only the difference in having a plan instead of a vow.
