BONUS | Why Your New Year’s Resolutions Always Fail (with Dr. Rangan Chatterjee)

In today's bonus episode, Ryan andDr. Rangan Chatterjee https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMg8KgzD8DM talk about why New Year’s resolutions usually fall apart and what actually works instead. They discuss why changing behavior is so hard, the key to making real change, and how most of us focus on the habit itself without understanding what it’s really doing for us. Dr. Rangan Chatterjee is a physician, author, TV presenter and podcast host of Feel Better Live More https://drchatterjee.com/podcast-episodes/where he talks with leading health experts who offer easy health life-hacks, expert advice and debunk common health myths. Check out Dr. Rangan Chatterjee’s latest book Make Change That Lasts https://drchatterjee.com/books/make-change-that-lasts/. You can follow him on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/drchatterjee/?hl=en @DrChatterjee https://www.instagram.com/drchatterjee/?hl=en, on X @Dr. ChatterjeeUK https://x.com/drchatterjeeuk?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and on YouTube @DrChatterjeeRangan https://www.youtube.com/@DrChatterjeeRangan 🎥 Watch Dr. Rangan Chatterjee https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMg8KgzD8DM’s FULL episode https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMg8KgzD8DM here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMg8KgzD8DM Demand the best for yourself. The Daily Stoic New Year New You https://join.dailystoic.com/nyny26/ challenge begins January 1, 2026. Learn more and sign up today at dailystoic.com/challenge http://dailystoic.com/challenge. 👉 Get The Daily Stoic New Year New You https://join.dailystoic.com/nyny26/ & all other Daily Stoic courses for FREE when you join Daily Stoic Life |dailystoic.com/life https://dailystoic.com/life/ 🎁 This holiday season, give the gift of Daily Stoic Premium | https://dailystoic.supercast.com/gifts/new 🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast onInstagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast/?hl=en:https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email athttps://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store:https://store.dailystoic.com/ 📱 Follow us: Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/,Twitter https://twitter.com/dailystoic,YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic,TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic?lang=en, andFacebook https://www.facebook.com/dailystoic See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation, designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit dailystoic.com.

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  What do you think about New Year's resolutions? Because I think when people are thinking about change, they're like, "I want to be a different person in 2025." Or, "I want to be a better person. I want to be closer to the person I know I'm capable of being." How do you think about resolutions? Because the reality is, a lot of people have that sensation, that feeling, that desire, and then most resolutions go nowhere and people spend another year as exactly the same person.

• 1:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  I mean, I spent a long time thinking about this because why is it that, depending which research study you read, 80% to 90% of New Year's resolutions have fallen by the wayside by the start of February? Right? Okay. And I've got 23 years of clinical experience. So I've seen tens of thousands of patients. So I kind of feel I've got a good steer, certainly from my own experience and what I've seen. I think there's a few things that people get wrong. Okay? I think they try and make it too big too quickly, which I have seen people do that. Generally speaking, the people who can transform their lives overnight, they've generally had some really, really big life experience: a divorce, a bereavement, they've lost the house. Something big?

• 2:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, you can do it. But if you don't have that driving you, I think if you make it too big, you're never going to make it last in the long term. Right. So, so there's a couple of things to say about these resolutions. Right. So one thing I don't think people understand enough is that every single behavior in our life serves a role. Too often, we try and change the behavior without understanding the role it plays in our life. So I'll give you a really practical example. If your alcohol consumption is your way of managing stress. Yeah. Right. You can white knuckle it for the first two or three weeks of January and you will stop. And you'll think, yeah, I've got more energy. I'm sleeping better. Great, great, great. I have no problem with that.

• 2:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  But if it's your way of managing stress, the only way you'll change it in the long term is by one of two things. Either the amount of stress in your life has to change. So then you'll no longer need the alcohol. Or you need an alternative behavior to alcohol to help you manage the stress. It sounds so obvious when I put it like that. But most people in my experience are caught up in their lives and they're they're focused too much on the behavior instead of being focused on what role does behavior play? And so I've come to the conclusion that, and this is really one of the primary theses in Make Change That Last, my new book, is this idea that it's not necessarily the

• 3:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  the behavior you need to focus on, it's the energy. What's it doing for you? Why are you doing it? And the other way I look at it for New Year's resolutions is all behaviors, I believe, come from either love or fear, right? At their core. Sure. So if you feel bad about who you are, you're consumed with guilt and shame and jealousy and envy, or whatever it might be. These are all things that come from the energy of fear.

• 3:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  If your changes are coming from that kind of energy, I don't think they're going to last in the long term because you're trying to overcome, like the behavior is in conflict with who you consider yourself to be. This was me a few years ago, right? So I would say, right, this year I'm going to meditate and I'd do 20 minutes of meditation every morning until like the 16th of January. Then I'll miss a day because work gets busy and I'd beat myself up in my head. Negative self-talk, I'd be wrong and you couldn't do it because you this year, you know, you were a loser. You couldn't, I used to have a really negative inner voice. I've completely changed that over the years with these kind of intentional practices. And now I find behavior change really,

• 4:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  really simple because I've focused on the underlying energies behind that behavior change. And one of the things I try to kind of address in this book, Ryan, is I'm a doctor, right? So through the lens of health, I think we're living in a world where we've got more information than ever before, more health podcasts, more health books, more blogs, whatever it might be. But why, despite all this increase in information and knowledge, is it not translating to better health outcomes?

• 5:07Ryan Holiday?

  We know what we should, most of us know what we should do or not do.

• 5:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  Exactly. So, you know, I really tried hard with this, but it's going, no, no, no, there's a lot of what we should be doing out there. I've written books on what we should be doing. This book addresses the why. Why are we still doing the things that we know are harming us?

• 5:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 5:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I think a lot of it is internal. It comes to our internal world and people don't want to go there, but that's where the gold is.

• 5:35Ryan Holiday?

  It's funny. So every year for Daily Stoic, we do this thing. We call it the Daily Stoic New Year, New Year Challenge. It's like 21 days of Stoic-inspired challenges. It's different every year, but it's just a bunch of cool Stoic practices. And the idea is like one or two will stick with someone and they'll take it through the year. One will get them to think about something differently. But it's funny, like we'll start talking about it in early December. The first day you announce it, a bunch of people sign up. Second time you announce, a bunch of people sign up. And then it sort of dips and then the. It starts on January 1st, but like the second biggest signup day is always like January 2nd. So like people want to change, like at some level, they heard about this, they want to change.

• 6:17Ryan Holiday?

  And then what we do, I think this is the most insidious part of uh, gets in the way of so much what we're capable of doing is we go, okay, I'm gonna do it tomorrow. They go, okay, that's, that starts on January 1st, so that's a couple of weeks from now. So in a couple of weeks from now, I'll get serious about thinking about signing up.

• 6:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 6:39Ryan Holiday?

  And then I'll miss it like, which is the stoics talk about, about how we know what we need to do. But then we say, we tell ourselves this huge lie, which is like, I'll do it in the morning. I'll do it after this, I'll do it when things calm down. By just moving the timeline up a little bit, we let ourselves off the hook and then most of us don't do it.

• 6:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's, I completely agree. It's what I've seen in patients for years. It's, it's always next week or next Monday or next month, but.

• 7:05Ryan Holiday?

  When the kids are older.

• 7:06Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, it starts today. So another five minute practice I try and do each day is what my wife and I call the five minute tea ritual. Like many people, if you're not intentional about it, you can live in the same house, but you get so busy with work and the children and you're like passing ships.

• 7:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 7:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? So a few years ago, we decided, yeah, listen, yeah, life gets busy from time to time. But we really need to intentionally focus on our relationships. So we have this practice called the five minute tea ritual. Every night when the kids were younger, and we still try and do it now when they've gone to bed. Before we do anything else, we come to the kitchen, we make a pot of mint tea, so non-caffeinated. And it's not the rule, the practice is that for five minutes, we catch up.

• 7:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 7:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? So it's only five minutes is the requirement. So we're just going to ask each other about our days.

• 7:56Ryan Holiday?

  Right. Instead of, uh, we gotta get a babysitter, we're gonna book a restaurant reservation, we're gonna try, you make it too big and then you're like, we can't do it this.

• 8:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. And it's like, before you notice a few months before you did anything. And what's really interesting is, and I think this, this builds on this five minute action each day. Principle that, that we're talking about. It's not that some days, those five minutes. Don't become thirty minutes or an hour.

• 8:17Ryan Holiday?

  More often than not.

• 8:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  More often than not, they do, because it's actually, oh, this is much more fun than going on Netflix or YouTube, whatever it might be. It's like, oh, this is, you know, this is why I married you, right? We actually want to spend time together.

• 8:28Ryan Holiday?

  Wait, we like each other? Yeah.

• 8:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. But some days, one of us will say, actually, it's just gonna be five minutes today. Like, I've actually got a few emails to do, or whatever it might be. Whenever we felt either one of us, oh, we're too busy, and it's been a few days without that practice. It's really interesting. You can feel it in our relationship, the niggles, the small things start to bother us. It's, there's less intimacy, there's less connection. But when we are quite disciplined about the five-minute tea ritual, everything else in our relationship, and therefore our lives and our health, starts to get better.

• 9:03Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 9:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  And so I'm a huge fan of these small things that we do consistently. I have found, time and time again, with me and with thousands of my patients, these are the things that I think move the needle for most people.

• 9:30Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, there's a writing rule of two crappy pages a day.

• 9:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 9:34Ryan Holiday?

  It seems like the opposite of how you would get good writing, to set a goal to do bad writing. But what it's doing is it's dramatically lowering the stakes. It's making it attainable. And it's actually hard to do crappy pages. So, but the idea is, you gotta, to do crappy pages and to do great pages, they share one similarity, which is that you have to show up.

• 9:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 9:55Ryan Holiday?

  And so by lowering the stakes, you can create the room to create positive momentum. And then the other thing, which I think is a rule we don't, or a, I guess, a factor, a fact of life we don't talk about enough, which is that I think quantity is a way to get to quality.

• 10:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:12Ryan Holiday?

  So it's like, let's say every day for a month, you sit down with your spouse and you have five minutes. A lot of those are gonna be five minutes of nothingness, but one of those, or a handful of those, are really gonna be significant, which you only could have had by having. The larger number, right? Like, and so the more you sit down and do the thing that what you're doing is increasing your chances of having those really transcendent days. And so, but people focus on like, you know what, like for writing, they're like, I'm going to rent a cabin, I'm going to go there and I'm going to have two great weeks in a row. No, you're not, you're not. First off, you're not going to do it.

• 10:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 10:49Ryan Holiday?

  And then second, like, you're going to have five of those days be crappy. And as a result, like, you're not going to return with the things that you needed. So it's, it's more about the day to day-ness, the consistency and the quantity that gets you.

• 11:03Rangan Chatterjee?

  You see this with health, right? So let's use the, the example of working out, which is a desire that many people have at all times, but particularly at the new year, right? It's like, I want to move my body more. I'm spending too much time at the desk. People start to get paralyzed with choice, right? Oh, what, you know, I'm going to run, I'm going to do yoga, I'm going to do Pilates. I'm going to, you know, what is that I'm going to do? And I've had patients before where they've literally got angina pains in their heart. We talk about physical activity. A month later, they're still coming back saying, hey, I can't decide which one to do. Right? And I understand that I have sympathy, but the point is frankly, any of them are going to help you.

• 11:42Ryan Holiday?

  Walked here and that would have.

• 11:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  And that would have helped you. And so through the lens of my five minute strength workout, people say, what? Do you do the same thing every day? Actually, for many years I did, because if you have to decide every morning, oh, what am I going to do today? That's procrastination. That's choice. That leads to indecision and inaction. And we know this in business, right? In the business world, when Amazon moved to one click ordering about 10 years ago or so, estimates say their profits went up by $300 million a year. Because back then, I don't know if you can remember this, but you know, there were four or five steps to take before you could purchase. You have to confirm order, put in your car details on a news screen.

• 12:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  There's three or four steps each time you have another option. It's a reason that you can pull out of the behavior. The reason we brush our teeth each night, well, one of the reasons is because it's the same action every day. On Tuesday evening, we don't go, you know what, I brushed yesterday. Yeah. Let me do something different today. I'm gonna floss today. And then on Wednesday, we don't go, I brush and I'm just gonna rinse today. We don't do that. We know- If you had to assemble the toothbrush, you had to unpackage it, if you had to make the toothpaste- Wouldn't do it. Yeah, right. And so that's why my dumbbell and kettlebell lives in my kitchen. My cafetiere is there. It all works together. It is so easy. I can barely not do it. Now, going back to New Year's resolutions, there's another, I think, for me, it's a big idea that I don't think we're talking

• 13:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  about enough, right? And I think it is a way of connecting a lot of your writings and practices with health, which, and I think sometimes people don't see the connection, right? So I believe that a lot of the reason why we can't make changes that last is because we don't understand the internal drivers that are leading us to those practices.

• 13:41Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.