7 science-based strategies to boost your willpower and succeed with your New Year’s resolutions

Behavioral science has ideas about how to keep on track beyond January.
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It’s that time of year when people make their New Year’s resolutions – indeed, 93% of people set them, according to the American Psychological Association. The most common resolutions are related to losing weight, eating healthier, exercising regularly and saving money.

However, research shows that 45% of people fail to keep their resolutions by February, and only 19% keep them for two years. Lack of willpower or self-control is the top cited reason for not following through.

How can you increase your willpower and fulfill your New Year’s promise to yourself? These seven strategies are based on behavioral science and my clinical work with hundreds of people trying to achieve their long-term goals.

1. Clarify and honor your values

Ask yourself why this goal matters to you. Do you want to lose weight because you value getting in shape to return to a favorite pastime of hiking, or because of societal expectations and pressures? People who are guided by their authentic values are better at achieving their goals. They also don’t run out of willpower, because they perceive it as a limitless resource. Figure out what makes you tick, and choose goals consistent with those values.

2. Frame goals and your life in positive terms

Focus on what you want to accomplish, not what you don’t. Instead of planning not to drink alcohol on workdays during the new year, commit to drinking your favorite sparkling water with Sunday to Thursday evening meals. Struggling to suppress thoughts takes a lot of energy, and they have a way of returning to your mind with a vengeance.

It also helps to reflect on the aspects of yourself and your life that you are already happy with. Although you might fear that this will spur complacency and inaction, studies show that gratitude and other positive emotions lead to better self-control in the long run.

3. Change your environment to make it easier

Research suggests that people with high willpower are exceptionally good at arranging their environment to avoid temptations. So, banish all credit cards from your wallet if your goal is to save money. And don’t keep a bowl of M&M’s at your work desk if you intend to eat healthy.

Surround yourself with people who share your goals.
Luis Quintero/unsplash, CC BY

If your coworkers regularly bring sweets to work, ask them to help you with your goals (they might get inspired to join in!) and bring cookies only for special occasions. Supportive friends and family can dramatically increase your chances of achieving your resolutions. Joining a group whose members practice behaviors you’d like to adopt is another great way to bolster your willpower, because having role models improves self-control.

4. Be prepared with ‘if-then’ strategies

Even the best resolution falls apart when your busy schedule and exhaustion take over. Formulate a series of plans for what to do when obstacles present themselves. These “if-then” plans are shown to improve self-control and goal attainment.

Each time you wake up in the middle of the night craving candies or chips, you can plan instead to read a guilty-pleasure magazine, or log into your online community of healthy eaters for inspiration, or eat an apple slowly and mindfully, savoring each bit. When you’re tired and about to skip that gym class you signed up for, call your supportive sister who is on standby. Anticipate as many situations as possible and make specific plans, vividly imagining the situations and what you will do in the moment.

5. Use a gradual approach

When you embark on a new goal, start small and build on early successes. Use one less spoonful of sugar in your coffee. Eventually, you might be able to forgo any sweeteners at all. If resisting that muffin initially proves to be too hard, try waiting 10 minutes. By the end of it, your urge will likely subside.

You might be surprised to realize that change in one domain of life – like abstaining from sweet processed foods – tends to spread to other areas. You might find you are able to bike longer distances, or moderate your caffeine intake more easily.

If it feels like the payoffs are in the distant future, you can plan a small gift for yourself along the way.
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6. Imagine rewards and then enjoy them

Picture the feeling of endorphins circulating through your body after a run, or the sun on your skin as you approach a mountain summit. Pay attention to all your senses: smell, sight, hearing, touch and taste. Visualizing rewards improves your chances of engaging in the activity that results in them.

If it’s hard to imagine or experience these rewards in the beginning, decide on small, meaningful gifts you can give yourself until the positive effects of the new behaviors kick in. For example, imagine yourself taking a half-day off work each month after you pay down your credit card debt: visualize exactly what you would do and how you would feel. And then do it.

7. Be kind to yourself, even during setbacks

Most people believe the way to increase willpower is to “whip oneself into shape,” because being kind to oneself is indulgent and lacks self discipline. But the exact opposite is true – people who harshly blame themselves for even small willpower failures tend to do worse in accomplishing their goals in the long run.

Try self-compassion instead. Cut yourself some slack and remember that being human means being imperfect. When you fall for that doughnut, don’t despair, and don’t throw in the towel. Treat yourself with care and understanding and then recommit to your goal the following day.

Remember, you aren’t likely to achieve your New Year’s resolutions by being self-critical and hard on yourself. Instead, boost your willpower through a series of small and strategic steps that will help you succeed.

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Jelena Kecmanovic, Adjunct Professor of Psychology, Georgetown University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Universities in South Africa need to rediscover their higher purpose

The demand for free higher education is one of the key factors that have led to competing waves of thinking and organisation in the sector.
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For over two decades South African higher education has been dominated by three successive and contending waves of thinking and organisation. They are: neo-liberal managerialism the decolonialisation of knowledge
and, most recently, the idea of a Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR).

By promising to “transform” higher education, each has taken centre stage at universities – or sections of them – by pledging greater value for the taxpayer (neo-liberalism); social emancipation (decolonisation); or greater access to employment (4IR).

The first wave follows Ronald Reagan’s “reform” of the Californian system which saw decreased state funding for universities. This was taken up by UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Her funding policies encouraged British universities to adopt business management practices. It also involved gearing degree offerings to the requirements of “the market”.

In South Africa, the second was symbolised by the March 2015 protest at University of Cape Town over the stature of Cecil John Rhodes. The movement has been marked by (sometimes violent) demands for a reform of curriculum away from the western “canon” and towards African epistemologies. Politically, it has been characterised by demands for free higher-education.

The third has been propagated by the World Economic Forum and across the world by the champions of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the digital revolution. In South Africa this wave has been promoted especially by the University of Johannesburg. This perspective holds that AI and machine-learning will dominate knowledge and knowledge-creating deep into the present century. All academic disciplines should, therefore, be geared to this end.

But there has been very little public discussion about the contradictions between the three moments.

South African higher education remains remarkably detached from society. Its loss of a social purpose can be seen as the erosion of the public and civic vitality which once fuelled the anti-apartheid struggle. Today, its mission has shrunk.

Why is there this disconnect?

The answer is simply that policies and incentives disadvantage the deep connection with the communities in which universities are located. They also emphasise peer-reviewed articles in internationally ranked journals as the measure of excellence. And they lead to a focus on educating students for high-paying jobs. They have little to do with positioning the welfare of society at the core of their scholarship, teaching, and public connections.

Put differently, higher education in the country doesn’t fulfil its civic potential. It has no real social purpose.

There are contrasting examples internationally. For instance, Tokai University, the leading STEM university in Japan, has a vision and mission grown from its founder’s philosophy – Professor Shigeyoshi Matsumae. His life goal was to create a university where young people and faculty would have sustained, deep interactions with social purpose.

Tokai University is implementing this philosophy. It has intensive citizenship education on all eight of its regional campuses for 7,000 entering first year students. It plans to expand this to 30,000.

The true purpose of universities

In the minds of faculty, administrators, government and business leaders, South African universities service two important, but limited, activities.

The first is to prepare students for jobs. The second is to conduct research that treats social communities more as objects of study than as knowledge partners. This approach excludes the development and support of civic agency from scholarly purpose.

Even disciplines that encourage research aimed at enhancing well-being – economics, is the best and worst example
– are deeply flawed. The emphasis is on technical skills and emulating models of prosperity that are based on individual rational choice as the motivator of human agency.

The hard truth is that higher education contributes to societal erosion when expert-knows-best approaches displace civic agency. This is because experts are often far removed from the needs of community development.

Alarmingly, too, teaching and research with public purpose have been squeezed out.

Higher education which prepares students for res publica – for the community – or in local terms, ubuntu – the community-confirming idea that we are human because of other humans – has been replaced. Instead what South Africa has is education suited for a res idiotica – in the Greek, a private and isolated person.

What can be done?

Fortunately, a growing literature points towards strands of civic revival in higher education. And there are a growing number of examples of a recovery of civic and democratic purposes in higher education.

Moreover, two broad streams of thinking are establishing new platforms for exchange, experiment, and social change. One is an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary field that has emerged under the broad rubric of “Civic Studies”.

This encourages research and real-world projects which integrate empirical, cultural, and political knowledge as resources for community agency, societal co-creation and human flourishing. One example is the US-based Anchor Institution Task Force. This involves more than 700 universities and colleges which use their economic, physical and educational resources for community development.

One of the key elements of civic studies is public work, a framework of social action developed in partnership with other organisations. These include the Institute for Democracy in South Africa and other international partners.

Cultural evolution is the other stream. This provides resources for civic reconstruction of higher education. Key to this approach is the work of the late Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom, a co-founder of civic studies. Working with a network of international colleagues on collective governance of common pool resources, she refuted the rational individualism which has held sway over a great deal of social science across the world.

Her work helped in the translation of cultural evolution science to meet the challenges of improving human societies.

Civic studies and cultural evolution show that human societies can succeed through cooperative efforts within and across groups. But this is only possible when members understand and pursue their interests with conscious regard for the well-being of all.

Higher education needs to take on this insight because it’s indispensable for revitalising human agency, flourishing communities, and active democracy.

It will also re-frame scholarship, teaching and public engagements. This needs to be in pursuit of ensuring that scholarship becomes an integral part of democratic life, not simply as a partner with society.

Peter Vale, Senior research fellow, Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, University of Pretoria and Harry Boyte, Senior Scholar in Public Work Philosophy, Augsburg University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

The long moral shadows cast by South Africa's colonial history

A Zulu household, from an 1895 book called The Colony of Natal: An Official Illustrated Handbook and Railway Guide.
J Causton and Sons /University of California Libraries/ Flickr

The post-apartheid state in South Africa inherited many colonial legacies. It has transformed considerably over the past 25 years. But it retains mechanisms of a state that secured power for a select few at the expense of most of its citizens.

In my book, Queering Colonial Natal, I looked at the ways in which the settler state “queered” African and Indian social practices in the 19th century. By “queered” I mean that settler regimes defined these practices as threats to the social order they wanted to impose in colonial Natal —established by the British in 1843, today South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province. They did this by decrying the practices as inherently wrong and themselves as superior and civilised.

At the same time, colonial archives reveal that both African and Indian people (migrants who arrived in Natal from South Asia throughout the 19th century) challenged these claims. For example, parliamentary reports show that while settler marriage laws imposed monogamous, heterosexual unions as the only legitimate form of matrimony, local populations asserted the legitimacy of their own polygynous institutions in colonial courts.

I traced the complicated histories of race, sexuality and power in contemporary South Africa, focusing on colonial Natal. The colony offers a particularly valuable space to study as it hosted competing African, Indian and European settlers in relatively close proximity.

Understanding the social and legal issues in colonial Natal gives insight into the ways power operated in southern Africa – and the British Empire more broadly.

The entanglements of race, gender, class and sexuality in contemporary South Africa flow in part from the contradictions of the settler colonial state. In tracing the history, I believe it’s possible to see the long shadows that colonial history casts over the country’s complicated present. This provides the opportunity to see that situations aren’t inevitable. It is possible to look for new ways to understand and navigate the contradictions in our contemporary world.

Dissecting the colonial state

One of the major themes I looked at was state control. This extended to marriage and social reproduction, the legal managing of alcohol and the ways mission institutions claimed civilising power over all peoples. I also examined the politics of access to education in the colony. This was to show how different people used ideas of race and gender to claim legitimacy and belonging.

I argue that the colonial state attempted to mark African social practices as aberrant. Or, as I write in the book, as “queer”. This included practices such as isithembu (polygamy), ilobolo (the ceremonial offering of cattle from the groom’s family to the bride’s family), clothing and beer-drinking.

Settlers marked these practices as inherently wrong. They oriented themselves in opposition to them as a way of asserting their normalcy or civilised status.

Africans and Indians in Natal didn’t accept this labelling. As my research shows, they challenged it. Using occupation, belonging and settlement, people sought to challenge easy claims to power and authority. At the very least, they tried to “unsettle” them. They also used colonial courts to challenge legal pronouncements.

One case I examined was the continuous (and constantly challenged) effort of the settler state to ban alcohol consumption by Africans and Indians. The ban on Africans drinking liquor began in the 1850s. The Natal legislature debated – but frequently failed to pass – legislation banning the brewing or consumption of umqombothi, so-called “Native beer”, throughout this period.

Similarly, the access of Indian men and women to alcohol was restricted in 1890. They were allowed to consume beverages on site only and couldn’t take any liquor in bottles.

These restrictions mapped onto ideas in which settlers imagined Africans and Indians having diminished capacity for handling alcohol. But this led to a particular problem for white settlers when Europeans became intoxicated. The colonial record is filled with debates and anxious conversations about the problem of the supposedly rational and capable settler failing to handle his or her liquor, and the fear that this indicated a lack of social power and control.

The second chapter of my book discusses the ways in which African and Indian bodies were marked as inherently aberrant in order to create the figure of the fit, capable European drinker. Both of these fictions existed to uphold racial orders of power in the colony.

I also sought to unpack the ways in which historical framings of “queerness” led to reactionary homophobia as a means of defence.

Thinking through the messy, entangled histories of the past allows us to unsettle the difficulties of the present. Examining the power dynamics of the colonial state allows us to see how it still has an impact on contemporary society.

“Queering Colonial Natal: Indigeneity and the Violence of Belonging in Southern Africa” is available from University of Minnesota Press for $25.

T.J. Tallie, , University of San Diego

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

What affects people’s brain function as they grow older? We sought answers in rural South Africa

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The world’s population is aging and for the first time ever there are more people over the age of 65 than under the age of 5. This global trend is reflected in many sub-Saharan African countries, including South Africa.

As people age, they experience a number of biological changes. These can include cognitive decline such as the ability to recall certain facts, concentrate or make decisions. Some cognitive decline is normal. But a more rapid or severe decline that affects activities of daily living is not. This can be a result of certain conditions such as stroke, Alzheimer’s disease or other related dementia.

Certain health and behavioural factors can influence the trajectory of cognitive decline. A healthy, balanced diet and regular physical activity make a difference in a positive way. Health conditions that have a negative effect include cardiovascular disease risk factors, such as hypertension and high cholesterol.

Most of the research that’s been done on dementia has been conducted in high-income countries. Little work has been done in Africa. Yet by 2050 the continent is expected to be home to an estimated 72 million people with Alzheimer’s or related dementia.

We set out to measure the prevalence and predictors of cognitive impairment in older rural South Africans. We found that the levels were strongly associated with age, and were similar to those reported by other studies from sub-Saharan Africa and around the world.

We also found that the key factors related to a decline in cognitive function in people over 40 years of age were being a woman, levels of education, marital status and being poor.

What we learned

Our study is the largest ever undertaken on cognitive function in older rural South Africans.

The work was carried out as part of the health and aging in Africa study (HAALSI): a larger study on aging in rural South Africa. The study took place within the Agincourt Health and Demographic Surveillance System, which is located in rural northeast South Africa and run by South Africa’s Medical Research Council and the University of the Witwatersrand’s Agincourt Research Unit.

The site is representative of much of rural South Africa and the cohort is currently one of the largest, most well-defined active groups of older people on the African continent.

All participants provided written, informed consent to participate in the study. Participants with treatable medical conditions, such as high blood pressure, were referred to local health facilities.

We interviewed 5,059 adults 40 years and older. We assessed orientation (whether a person recognised who they were, where they were, and what time it was), and immediate and delayed recall of 10 words read out loud.

Overall, 8% of the population had cognitive impairment, with a significant increase in prevalence by age (2% in those 40-44 years older compared to 24% in those 75 years or older). This is similar to the limited number of other studies in sub-Saharan Africa. The same trends are seen around the world. But direct comparison can be difficult due to differences in the tools used to measure cognition and the different composition of study participants.

Drivers

We found that the factors that made the biggest contribution to people’s cognitive function included being a woman. Nine percent of the women had poor cognition, versus 7% of men. Other factors included being poor and the person’s level of education.

Other studies have shown that formal education creates “cognitive reserve”. This is the idea that people’s ability to deal with cognitive tasks differs. People with increased cognitive reserve may have better cognition later in life. We wanted to see what the effect of limited or no education was on cognition in the South African context.

We found a strong correlation between the level of formal education and cognitive score. Those with no formal education performed worse than those with some primary education. This was true of both men and women at all age groups. Those with some primary education, at all ages, performed worse than those with some secondary education.

Women with no formal education had lower cognitive scores than men. However, the difference in cognitive scores between women and men disappeared in those who had any form of formal education. This suggests that even poor quality education may positively affect later life cognitive function.

When it came to health factors, we did find an association between HIV and hypertension and higher cognitive scores. This surprising finding needs further research. A history of physician-diagnosed stroke, angina or heart attack was associated with lower cognitive scores.

What next?

Over the next four years, we will continue to follow the participants. Our aim is to characterise the cognitive function and trajectory in the cohort more carefully. We will do this by using technology such as neuroimaging. This involves looking at changes to brain structure and size. We will also be using more refined cognitive assessments delivered on a tablet.

And we will look at the effect on cognition of social factors, such as the size of social network and amount of social interaction, and biological factors, such as changes in brain size and structure as well as the presence of certain biomarkers.

By understanding the rate of decline and the factors affecting it, we can begin to think about possible ways of intervening.

As the global and African population ages, levels of cognitive decline and dementia will increase. Studies such as ours can provide useful information that will allow clinicians, researchers and policymakers to understand the burden better. Importantly, interventions can be developed with the aim of enabling every person to age more gracefully.

Ryan G Wagner, Research Fellow, Wits School of Public Health, University of the Witwatersrand and Darina Bassil, Research associate, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

South Africa's main opposition party shows signs of serious strain

Helen Zille’s election as head of the Democratic Alliance’s federal council has rattled many.
EFE-EPA/Nic Bothma

South Africa’s main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, elected a new chairperson of its federal council this past weekend. Its choice – Helen Zille, former leader of the party, and former Premier of the Western Cape province – has sent shock waves through the party.

The immediate fallout from her reelection to the top DA post was the resignation of Herman Mashaba, the DA mayor of South Africa’s largest city, Johannesburg. He decried Zille’s win as signalling a takeover of the party by rightwing elements.

Mashaba’s resignation is puzzling. A self-made businessman as well as a former chairman of a rightwing think tank, the Free Market Foundation, his criticism of Zille seems misplaced. His views on economic issues are on the right of the political spectrum. And Mashaba sounds even more conservative than Zille on the issue of undocumented immigrants.

Zille was elected to the party’s top post because she remains popular among the DA’s membership base. She is also the last top DA leader with anti-apartheid struggle credentials dating back to the 1980s End Conscription Campaign and the veteran human rights organisation the Black Sash.

But she’s also a hugely controversial figure. The reasons for this stem from comments she has made on Twitter in recent years, including a series in which she defended the legacy of colonialism.

Her posts prompted stinging criticism from the DA’s national leader, Mmusi Maimane, as well as other black members of the party.

Zille’s appointment, Mashaba’s resignation and signs that there is a concerted campaign within certain quarters of the party to get rid of Maimane all point to a political party that’s in deep turmoil. This affects the DA’s strength as official opposition nationally.

Tensions in the DA

The DA can best be described, mostly, as a broad church of liberals. One point on its spectrum are what could be called “equal-opportunity liberals”. Mainly white liberals, this group tends to oppose affirmative action, arguing that it violates the principle that opportunities should be allocated on merit.

Another faction comprises “affirmative action or diversity liberals”. The group is mainly black and supports race-based affirmative action as a way of addressing the past injustices of apartheid.

These camps are divided – not entirely, but significantly – along colour lines.

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Read more:
Liberalism in South Africa isn't only for white people -- or black people who want to be white

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As well as policy, there are other dimensions to tensions within the party.

One is around the coalitions it established in three cities after elections in 2016 when neither the ANC nor the DA won sufficient support to run the councils.

In Nelson Mandela Bay the DA took over running the highly corrupt council by establishing a coalition with a much smaller party, the United Democratic Movement. The partnership was fraught and finally collapsed in 2018 amid a great deal of acrimony.

In the cities of Tshwane, home to the country’s capital Pretoria, and Johannesburg, the DA’s toehold on power has been even more fragile. The DA is in a tactical alliance in both councils with the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) – the third largest party in the country, which presents itself as politically radical and to the left of the DA and ANC.

The DA and EFF’s tactical alliance involves the EFF supporting the DA’s mayors on a vote-by-vote basis, or abstaining from voting.

This appears to limit the DA from completely instituting the clean governance which it has made the showcase of its rule.

Another dimension to the DA’s current situation is that the party has two centres of power. Zille, as the newly elected chair of the federal council, the party’s highest decision-making structure in between its federal congresses, holds arguably the most powerful post in the DA. Maimane, as leader of the party, will be bound by the policy and strategic choices of the federal council led by Zille.

What next

It would be strategic for Zille and Maimane to immediately and seriously negotiate the relationship between themselves and between their posts. It will also be strategic for Zille to let a professional public relations officer handle her Twitter account in future.

Part of leadership is about making tough choices. One of these will be: does the DA relinquish power in Nelson Mandela Bay, in Johannesburg and in Tshwane, rather than taint its brand as the clean-up party?

If it fails to make these hard decisions it risks sliding even further in the polls. The party secured only 20.8% of the national poll in elections earlier this year.

This result is no doubt what’s brought the present tensions to a head – and not only about the future of Maimane. Other failures that have been pointed out include the DA losing Afrikaner voters to the rightwing Freedom Front Plus (FF+).

In 15 months the party will be in full campaigning mode for the local government elections in 2021. It will therefore need to finalise its leadership posts, its candidates, and its policies in the intervening months.

As well as preventing Afrikaner voters from swinging back to the Freedom Front Plus, the DA also needs to strategise how it plans to win back black votes, and win more of them than ever before.

For example, it needs to spell out its alternative options to affirmative action and black economic empowerment. This debate often goes under the title of “race as a proxy for disadvantage” – mostly economic disadvantage.

All told, the 60-year-old DA faces an interesting and complex year ahead. As the party grows larger, the coalition of viewpoints within it must also grow. Maybe it could learn a few lessons from the governing African National Congress, which brings together nationalists, communists and the labour movement, among other persuasions, in a veritable broad church.

Keith Gottschalk, Political Scientist, University of the Western Cape

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.