We all have New Year resolutions that failed. Armed with an exhaustive list of ways we want to improve, we start the year full of hope and promise. That is, until reality crushes our hopes and dreams with cold figures: less than ten percent of us keep our resolutions, and eighty percent of those who give up admit doing so by February. 

This can seem surprising, but only on the surface. The beginning is the most difficult phase of this whole enterprise. Most people fail because they don’t understand how habits work. Resilience during the beginning stages is key to forming a routine, and success can only be attained if you push past the first hurdles. Every obstacle you overcome increases your chance of sticking to the plan and accelerates the formation of a habit. When the pattern forms, it becomes harder to fail than to succeed. 

Let’s say you decide to start your day by doing twenty push-ups. At first, you can barely get through the task. Doing twenty push-ups if you’ve never done one demands every bit of energy you have. With every passing day, you start to adapt, and your body starts gaining strength. At what point do you think it’s more likely for people to quit: is it the first week, when they are struggling to get to ten push-ups, or two months in, when twenty push-ups are a breeze? 

Consider the following study conducted by Wolfram Shultz, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Cambridge. Schultz specialized in exploring how humans learn. In one of his most memorable experiments, he used a macaque named Julio. Shultz inserted a tiny electrode into Julio’s brain that transcribed his neural activity in real time. He was then positioned in front of a computer screen with a simple task: whenever a shape came up on the screen, Julio was to pull a lever. When he accomplished the task, Julio got a reward (a drop of blackberry juice, his favorite). The sweet juice flooded his brain with happy hormones. After doing this for a while, the connection among geometric shapes, the lever, and blackberry juice became clear to Julio. Once that relationship had been established, Julio’s brain activity spiked not when he got the juice, but as soon as the shape appeared on the screen! 

At first, Julio was indifferent to what was happening on the screen. It was hard to keep him in place. As the experiment went on, the rewards added up, and getting him to complete the task got easier. Once the habit was formed, it was hard to get him to do anything else: all Julio wanted was to sit in front of the screen and wait for shapes to appear. This behavior translates neatly to humans. After all, Schultz’s specialty was human behavior. This study confirms that however daunting a task can seem, it has the potential to produce happy hormones once it becomes a habit.  

Imagine setting out to go to the gym every day to achieve the body of your dreams. During the first weeks, it may seem like an impossible habit to sustain. DOSE would spike when you look in the mirror after every workout to see the progress you have made (the equivalent of receiving blackberry juice). During this stage, the reward is only associated with the results, and it is tough to stay the course. However, if you stick with it long enough to develop a habit, everything changes. The irresistible drive that initially urged you to skip becomes the source of your Dopamine spikes, triggering a flood of happy hormones into your brain.   

You can achieve your goals if you sustain a behavior long enough to develop a habit. Our brains are pattern seekers. Finding patterns allows our brains to create shortcuts, cutting out unnecessary in-between elements for efficiency. We quickly go from geometric shape-lever-juice-happy hormones, to shape-happy hormones. Repetition and consistency train the brain to associate the desired action with a prize, thereby creating a craving for the action.