When Best Intentions Aren't Good Enough

30 Jan 2007

By

Wray Herbert

Recent Studies Shed Light On Why It Can Be So Difficult To Stick To Our New Year's Resolutions.

I am a gym rat. And my gym, like gyms all over the country, has been really crowded lately. I used to get a little peevish about this January surge in traffic on the treadmill and Stairmaster, but I no longer do. As a regular, I know that most of these newly dedicated fitness buffs will be gone by February.

This is not arrogance. I've had my share o' relapses. The fact is, it's really hard to 'keep the promises we make to ourselves, including New Year's resolutions. No' only will the January joggers soon be drifting back to their couches, others will be restocking their liquor cabinets, tossing their nicotine patches and bingeing on Chunky Monkey-in short, giving —p on all those optimistic visions of healthy living.

Why are we so bad at adhering to our most well-intended commitments? Psychologists are very interested in this question, because of the obvious public-health implications, and they recently have been probing beyond the common and unhelpful answer: weak willpower. What does weak willpower really mean on a basic neurocognitive level? What precisely is going on in our brains at the moment when we say, "Eh, bag it"?

The problem with relapse is that, well, it doesn't make sense. It's not rational. A "rational actor" (as economists like to say") weighs risks" weighs benefits, and then makes a calculation and a choice. But making rational calculations and choices is the easy part. We all know that cigarettes are awful for us, and that exercise is good. Psychologists are perplexed and intrigued by what comes next, in between intention and action.

Psychologist Peter Hall of Waterloo University in Ontario, Canada, speculated that the connection between intention and behavior might lie in the neurons, specifically in a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex. This brain structure is responsible for many higher cognitive skills, including what's called executive functioning. Executive functioning is not the same as intelligence. It has more to do with effortful self-regulation: When your emotions take over and you have to give yourself a good talking-to, your executive neurons fire up to save you from your more primitive impulses.

To test this theory, Hall and his colleagues ran a series of experiments looking at the possible connection between executive skills and adherence to resolutions. In one experiment, they tested volunteers' executive acumen using the so-called Stroop test. This may be familiar because it circulates on the Internet a lot, as a kind of electronic parlor game, but it's a highly regarded cognitive test: The names of colors flash on 'he screen for an instant, but in the "wrong" colors (the word "red" in green letters, for example), and the idea is to quickly identify the color of the letters. It's difficult, because to answer correctly you have to mentally override the impulse to read the word. The same effortful overriding-and the same underlying neuronal activity-is presumably needed to keep showing up at the gym, even when it hurts.

Hall also measured the IQ of the volunteers. After testing these different cognitive abilities, he gathered information on various health-related behaviors: smoking, problems with drinking, sleep disturbances and exercise. As reported in the current issue of Health Psychology, Hall found that the sharper the subjects' executive functioning, the healthier their lifestyles in general. Poor executive acumen was connected especially strongly with heavy cigarette smoking. Interestingly, IQ did not predict differences in healthy habits; IQ apparently helps with making the rational choice in the first place, but not much with follow-through. Follow-through requires executive self-regulation, and unhealthy people seem to have trouble talking themselves out of doing things that are immediately rewarding-or into doing things that are uncomfortable, or simply inconvenient.

Although this first study clearly showed a connection between executive agility and healthy life choices, it didn't really zero in on intention-or the ability to stick to a resolution. In a separate set 'f experiments, Hall again measured executive agility, but this time he asked people what changes they were planning to make. Specifically, their "resolutions" included exercising more and eating more fruit and vegetables. When he later had them report on their actual exercise and diet, executive agility was a powerful indicator of who would and who would not stick to resolutions. As reported in a forthcoming issue of the journal Psychology and Health, sincere intention is necessary but not sufficient. Stick-to-itiveness appears to require a robust prefrontal cortex as well.

These findings are also consistent with recent cognitive studies of addiction, which is after all just an extreme version of saying, "Eh, bag it." Using a variant of the Stroop test called the drug-Stroop, Dutch scientists flashed various words in various colors and (as with the regular Stroop test) asked people to say the color, not the meaning, of the word. They found that addicts had a harder time with this task when the meaning was related to their addiction. For instance, alcoholics' reaction time was slower when the word "beer" appeared in red than when the word "barn" appeared in red. In other words, as reported in the latest issue of Current Direction in Psychological Science, their brains were struggling with effortful regulation of their automatic, impulsive thinking.

So while the consequences of addiction relapse are obviously more painful and momentous, the underlying neurology appears identical to the neurology behind all of our everyday failures to stick to healthy choices. Knowing that should allow January hopefuls to forgive themselves a few slips here and there, and talk themselves back onto the Stairmaster. Even in February.

Copyright 2007. Used with permission from Wray Herbert.