If your new year resolutions never quite seem to stick, finding strength in numbers might provide a lasting answer, according to new research. Changing our habits for the better seems to be one of the most intractable challenges we face in life. While about 80 per cent of us make annual resolutions, more than half fail to keep them. Health and wellbeing are the areas we most often resolve to improve, but a third of us admit to making and breaking the same vows every time, a Boots survey of 1,050 Britons reported last year.

This phenomenal failure rate has attracted a host of researchers seeking the secrets to realising our better selves. The latest study, by Richard Wiseman, professor of the public understanding of psychology, Hertfordshire University, indicates that seeking group support and advice can provide a significant boost, particularly for women.

Professor Wiseman has just revealed the results of his year-long survey into the resolution styles of 3,000 people, which he claims is the largest study of its type. He believes that gender plays a role and that women are particularly successful if they tell their friends and family about their resolutions, or are encouraged by others not to give up after they have relapsed (being encouraged, for example, to treat a chocolate binge as a temporary setback rather than failure).

Men get better results if they set goals

Men, he says, do better if they get support in the shape of wise and timely advice. Males are significantly more likely to achieve their aims when encouraged to engage in either goal-setting (such as losing a pound each week, rather than trying to lose weight in general), or to focus on the rewards associated with achieving their goal (such as being sexier). “Women might be reluctant to tell others about their resolutions and so they benefit more from the support provided by friends and family once they have made their goals public,” says Professor Wiseman, the author of the bestselling book, The Luck Factor. “Men may be more likely to adopt a macho attitude that results in unrealistic expectations, and so goal-setting helps them to achieve more.”

Community support may be found through family, neighbours or colleagues, but in our increasingly technological society, more of us seek it from each other online. The world of cyber-support so far has attracted sparse attention, but the available research indicates that, in the sphere of health resolutions, it can make the crucial difference between success and failure. A study by Brown University Medical School in the US reports that people who dieted with the help of a structured online community programme lost three times more weight in six months than those who surfed the web for diet information.

The 2001 study concludes that continued contact through high-quality feedback and discussion groups are the most important services that websites can offer to healthy resolvers. The researchers divided the volunteers into two groups: the first received weekly e-mails of individual advice and had access to message boards for social support; the second merely had online diet and exercise information. In six months, the first group lost three times as much weight as the other one.

Human beings are natural backsliders

One major factor in successful resolution-making was, as ever, persistence. During the study, if the participants’ internet visits declined, so did the rate of weight loss. And while you can’t download willpower from a website, the researchers concluded that those who received feedback and community support were more likely to keep logging on.

Such is human nature: we seem wired to be natural backsliders, who need chivvying and encouragement from our peers in order to succeed. After all, when it comes to adopting healthy habits, we mostly know what we should be doing: exercise regularly, eat a varied diet, stay in reasonable shape, get enough sleep, don’t smoke, drink sensibly, avoid stress and nurture healthy relationships. Da-di-da. So why do we resist adopting simple strategies that we know are good for us?

Dr Nando Pelusi, a clinical psychologist based in New York City, blames our Neanderthal ancestors. Their focus was survival, rather than worrying what they were going to be like in six months’ time. Because it was critical for our forebears to conserve energy, we evolved to expend minimal effort when we can get away with doing so. There was no point thinking long-term in a world without medicine, banks, insurance policies or fridges. Life was short and brutal, and our ancestors encountered little delay between desire and action. Feeling thirsty meant seeking water and feeling hungry meant foraging for food. Our behaviour required little or no self-talk, and certainly not the nagging self-chastisement required for us to shed shoddy short-termist habits and adopt ones that may bring a long-term dividend, Pelusi says.

Other psychologists point out that the human species tends to suffer from “poor frustration tolerance”. We give up too easily. And we tend to slip back into default mode – a state called homeostasis, where organisms tend to maintain a constant state or to try to restore their equilibrium if their constancy is disturbed.

Even athletes need positive feedback

Group support can help us to overcome these inherited design faults. Andy Lane, a professor of sports psychology at Wolverhampton University, sees this effect in even the most ambitious of athletes. For the past four years, the US Olympic ski team has placed a strong emphasis on watching and providing positive feedback for each other. The skiers reported a boost to their self-esteem and confidence, and the team’s performance improved. “In groups they can be pushed by fellow athletes; in an exercise such as circuit-training a natural competitiveness emerges which can be rewarding,” Professor Lane says. Many casual exercisers, meanwhile, sign up to gyms in January, only to stop attending a couple of months later. “People get bored exercising alone,” he adds.

Before you seek outside help for a new year’s resolution, it’s important to perform some proper soul-searching, according to the Economic and Social Research Council. Its 2006 review of 129 previous studies of behaviour-change strategies concluded that long-lasting change is most likely to occur when it is self-motivated and rooted in positive thinking, rather than inspired by guilt, fear, or the idea that we ought to be trying to change because, well, it’s new year and it’s expected of us.

The five stages of successful change

One of the best-tested theories of health-behaviour change is called the trans-theoretical model (TTM), which was first developed in the field of alcoholism. TTM presumes that, at any given time, we are in one of five stages of change: precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, or maintenance. People move from stage to stage, and each is a preparation for the next, so hurrying through or skipping one is likely to result in failure. Different strategies are needed at different stages. For example, a smoker at the precontemplation stage – who is not even thinking about quitting – probably isn’t ready to start listing alternatives to smoking.

The theory acknowledges human frailty and the fact that most of us relapse. One study found that smokers trying to quit went through the “action” stage three or four times on average before they succeeded. And, rather like snakes and ladders, slipping up often meant landing back at the start of the process. Proponents of TTM say that you should not be derailed by your relapses, but to think of them as integral to changing: for example, you may find that the strategy you adopted didn’t fit into your lifestyle.

This idea is reflected in the results of Professor Wiseman’s research. He says that people who have tried to achieve this year’s resolution before but failed should approach their old problem in a new way. For example, instead of trying to lose 2st (12.7kg), they could set targets to exercise more. Or they could use The Times’ new online-community based strategy instead.

Professor Richard Wiseman is starting another year-long study to examine the topic further. You can volunteer for his experiment at www.newyearscience.co.uk

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