The dangers of an “all or nothing” mindset
By MOLLY THOMPSON – mmtthompson@ucdavis.edu
New Year’s has recently come and gone and with it a slough of resolutions to start going to the gym four times a week, go vegan, stop skipping lectures or read 30 books before the end of the year. There’s an initial spurt of motivation from novelty and the compelling idea of a beautiful, new life created by new habits.
But before too long, the schedule gets filled up. It’s hard to get to the gym on cold mornings, ice cream has never sounded better, 8 a.m. lectures are honestly just unrealistic and the first book has yet to be opened past the prologue. It sounds like it’s time to give up.
As a society, we place a lot of emphasis on the “go big or go home” all-or-nothing mentality that fuels this kind of thinking. If I can’t accomplish my goals as I initially set them, if I can’t complete something in its totality, I might as well not try at all, right?
Wrong — there’s a lot to be said for doing something partway.
Take the example of aiming to transition from a conventional omnivore diet to a vegan diet: an admirable goal. Maybe it’s for environmental sustainability, maybe it’s for personal health, maybe it’s for ethical reasons, but if I’m used to eating animal products and they’re part of the diet I rely on (physically and emotionally), it’s going to be really intimidating to upturn how I grocery shop, meal plan, cook and get in all my necessary nutrients. It’s exciting at first, and I’m motivated by the desire to do well, but that spark wears off eventually. I start to feel unsure of what I’m doing and lost in the aisles of the Davis Food Co-op. I start to lose confidence in my kitchen skills. I start to miss my usual In-N-Out order. The effort no longer feels worth it, so I give up.
But what if, instead of giving up completely, I just went to In-N-Out every once in a while? What if, instead of switching up everything about how I get my groceries, I went back to Trader Joe’s and just picked up oat milk instead of cow’s milk? What if, instead of trying to venture into a new set of meals I’m unfamiliar with, I kept making my favorite recipes but just swapped tofu or tempeh where beef or pork would usually be? Maybe I wouldn’t feel the need to give up.
A general recommendation with New Year’s resolutions is to make them specific — common advice says that vague goals are hard to achieve and don’t provide good motivation. However, I would argue that specific goals are easier to abandon.
If I realize in May that I’m not on track to meet my goal of reading 30 books in the year, I’m likely going to stop focusing on reading at all and vow to try harder next year. At this point it feels like a lost cause, so there’s no point in trying to keep up. But if my goal had been to read more in general or to read more nonfiction or to learn something new from a book, I wouldn’t feel like I was failing by falling behind by an arbitrary margin.
The principle extends far beyond New Year’s resolutions — that’s just a topical application. If you want to go vegetarian because you’ve heard that meat has a high carbon footprint, but you’re afraid to because you think you’d miss sushi, then keep eating sushi but make the other swaps. There’s no rule that says that if you’re not 100% perfect you shouldn’t even try. It’s the opposite — you’ll be making a huge difference by reducing the amount of meat you eat on a daily basis, and you can still keep eating sushi.
You can be mostly vegan but take your coffee with whole milk. You can go to the gym four times a week except when you’re on your period. You can read two books every month but skip one when you have a big midterm. You can miss your 8 a.m. class a couple of times and still go back. A “slip up” doesn’t mean you’ve failed, and it certainly doesn’t mean you should stop trying.
Oftentimes when we put things in an “all or nothing” frame, we sabotage our efforts from the get-go. We feel like anything less than all is pointless, so we might as well stop trying if we break our perfect streaks. In a world where goals are binary and the only outcomes are all or none, some feels like it might as well be none. But that’s not true; Your efforts are not in vain. Cut yourself some slack — at the end of the day, some will always be better than none.
Written by: Molly Thompson — mmtthompson@ucdavis.edu
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by individual columnists belong to the columnists alone and do not necessarily indicate the views and opinions held by The California Aggie
