New Year’s Resolutions? Don’t Bother!

[Baptism of the Lord] Epiphany 1
Isaiah 42:1-9
Matthew 3:13-17

People who belong to a gym or to a fitness or yoga class don’t like January.  They don’t like January because at the beginning of a new year fitness classes are filled with people who decided that THIS IS GOING TO BE THE YEAR!  I’M MAKING A CHANGE AND IT’S STARTING THIS JANUARY.  FROM NOW ON, THINGS ARE GOING TO BE DIFFERENT!
 
A full 50% of the American public makes a New Year’s resolution.  These resolutions often have to do with healthier living, better exercise and better eating, but they can involve a wide variety of goals and projects.  So half of us make some kind of commitment to change every January.  And by mid-February, 80% of those making a resolution fail to stay at it.  Again, four out of five of us can’t keep the resolution we made just six weeks prior.  

Now maybe you are among the 20%.  Maybe you’re part of the small sliver of the population who makes a commitment and consistently follows through.  If so, you are welcome to leave.  Get some brunch.  Enjoy your day.  We’ll catch up with you later.  If you’re still here, I am going to assume that you have some experience with wanting long-term, long-lasting changes in your life, only to face discouragement as that desired newness keeps eluding you. 

January is the time for new beginnings in our worship calendar as well.  Each year we move from Christmas into the season of Epiphany by observing the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River.  It is a quick move, of course.  Just a couple of weeks ago Jesus was born.  And today he’s 30 years old and beginning his public ministry by going to John and asking to receive baptism.

At the scene of Jesus’ baptism, we see what’s possible for him and what’s possible for us.  To receive baptism is to step into a stream of new life, new hope, new power, new relationships.  To receive baptism is to step into a swiftly flowing current of new habits that begin to bend your life in new directions.  But the newness doesn’t emerge from our own resources.  It isn’t something we choose or decide to do.  It is, instead, like a bird that circles, descending, gently alighting on your life.  It is like hearing a beautiful voice speak to you, saying, “You are my child, in whom I delight.” 

All of us seek newness, but we’re not sure how to get there.  We’re willing to make changes, we just don’t know which changes are the most important.  We know that we can’t just manufacture the life we want, because we’ve already tried that many times.  And so here at the beginning of another year, we come to the river with Jesus, asking for the tender energy that is God’s Spirit, eager to hear the voice of the parent singing its delight in us. 
So today, I invite you to dispense with the folly of New Year’s Resolutions.  I invite you to shift your attention instead to step into the current of new habits formed and held by God’s grace.

A recent article by Jerome Groopman reviewed some of the recent scientific work on habits.  The thesis is simple but profound: resolutions rarely work because the brain forms habits unconsciously [“The Resistance: Can science help us change our habits?”, by Jerome Groopman (The New Yorker, Oct. 28, 2019).]

Consider a few wise voices on the power of habit:

Aristotle in the Nichomachean Ethics: “Some thinkers hold that it is by nature that people become good, others that it is by instruction.”  Aristotle argued that habits are responsible.

Cicero called habit “second nature” – a term we still use.

Alexander Hamilton in Federalist Paper No. 27: “Man is very much a creature of habit.”  Again, a phrase that has become common.

William James: “All our life . . . is but a mass of habits.”

Very few of us want to be referred to as “creatures of habit.”  That makes us sound less than creative.  “Creature of habit” calls to mind a depressed middle-aged man who stops by the grocery store each evening after his dull job, purchasing the same frozen dinner before returning home to watch the same stale television program before getting up to do it all over again.  Who wants to be that guy?

We want to be more playful and more spontaneous than that.  We like to think of ourselves as active, as responsible agents, as choosers, deciders, people with will power, capable of exercising self-control and guiding our lives in the directions we want them to go. 

New scientific research is asking how people change, how we break bad habits and start something new.  Scientists believe that any significant change involves an “interplay of decisions and unconscious factors.”  This research shows that we tend to overestimate the power of our conscious, decision-making abilities.  But the truth is that it takes great energy to keep making conscious decisions all day.  “To go about our lives, we need to make some behaviors automatic.”

Researchers can look at MRI scans and see the different parts of the brain that are active during tasks that are conscious and tasks that are routine, memorized, and unconscious.  When you’re learning a task, the brain activity involves your prefrontal cortex and your hippocampus, parts of the brain associated with decision making and executive control.  But when you repeat a task, brain activity moves deep into the “rudimentary machinery of our minds.”  “There, a task is turned into a habit.”

The truth of the matter is that you need a good deal of your life to be shaped by unconscious brain functions, because that’s the only way you can free up enough brain space to pay attention to the things that are really important.  If you focus on one-off behaviors that you only need to do occasionally – getting a flu shot was the example used here – then conscious decision making works well.  But for behaviors that involve repetition – things you want to be able to easily do over and over again, habits are crucial.  In fact, research shows that “our actions are habitual forty-three per cent of the time.”

Because such a large part of our lives involves unconscious habits - routines that we do by rote instead of by thinking explicitly about them - we usually can’t change our behaviors by will power or by choosing or making a conscious decision to do so.

In the famous Stanford Marshmallow experiment in the 1960’s, “children were seated alone in front of a marshmallow and were scored on whether they resisted eating it. The resulting determination of a child’s level of ‘executive function’ supposedly distinguishes life’s winners and losers . . . “. 

Researchers wanted to know how long each child could refrain from eating the marshmallow.  But they created two versions of the experiment.  “In one version, the children could see the marshmallow in front of them; in the other, they knew that it was there but couldn’t see it.  On average, the children lasted only six minutes when presented with visible temptation but could manage ten minutes if the treat was hidden.”  Researchers conclude that self-control is not simply a matter of how disciplined your will power is; it’s also a matter of the details of your specific situation.

In a variety of experiments along these lines, researchers find that we are “most successful at adopting productive behaviors not when [we resolve] to do better” but when we alter our environment.  In the marshmallow test, successful self-control “came from essentially covering up the marshmallow.”  This is the thesis of the book, Good Habits, Bad Habits, by pscychologist Wendy Wood: “the path to breaking bad habits lies not in resolve but in restructuring our environment in ways that sustain good behaviors. . . . We achieve situational control, paradoxically, not through will power but by finding ways to take will power out of the equation.”

Marketers use this insight against you all the time.  The cashier at a fast-food restaurant will always ask, “Do you want fries with that?”  The easiest answer is “Yes.”  It takes much more energy to reject the suggestion.  Media companies know how to keep you binge-watching all those shows.  They don’t expect you to make the choice to watch another episode.  They just queue it up automatically and you’ll have to find the energy to stop it if you’re trying to do something else.  The Uber app never wants you to think about what it will cost to call an Uber, nor do they want you worried about whether you have cash or not.  So your credit card is already loaded into the app.  You call a car and ride wherever you want and never handle cash or even think about paying.  It just happens, automatically.

Or take, for another example, the decline in smoking over the past twenty years.  Did Americans just summon the will power all of a sudden to stop smoking?  No.  What happened was a cluster of policies that made it much more inconvenient to smoke.  There were “laws that ban smoking in restaurants, bars, airplanes, and trains; taxes that have helped triple the price of cigarettes in the U.S. in the past twenty years; the purge of cigarettes from vending machines, and of tobacco ads from TV and the radio.”

A book by Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit, finds that “the key lies not in breaking a habit through will power but in replacing one habit with another.”  If you want to change something about your life, yes it will take effort, discipline, and decision making.  But you can’t just “choose” a new life.  Rather, you will have to “choose” to place yourself in a new environment, in a different situation; you will have to “choose” a new strategy, new rhythms, new relationships, and new habits.  That much, science can tell us. 

But to be honest, most of us don’t need science to tell us what matters, what makes life worth living.  There is some simple wisdom about patterns and behaviors that lead to health and joy and a sense of purpose.  Most of us would include connections with friends and loved ones, meaningful work or service - whether it’s paid or not - mindful eating, staying active, getting plenty of rest, and sharing our strengths and resources with others.

And yet the changes we want to make usually elude us when we try to choose them, when we summon our best energy to decide to be different.  But there is another way – the way of baptism.  Our desire for newness, change, and growth is itself a gift from God.  And baptism reminds us that the river’s strong and gentle current will carry our lives forward.  The goal is to relax and to be carried along; to open ourselves to the gently descending energy of the Spirit; and to sort through the noise to listen for the only voice that matters: the voice that reminds you that you do not have to change to be loved.  You are loved already.  You do not have to fix anything in order to please God.  God already takes intense delight in your life.  Now we can emerge from the river and walk into a new year ahead.

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