Goal Disengagement in Everyday Life: Longitudinal Observation of New Year’s Resolutions

Goal disengagement has been well studied in contexts where giving up is generally adaptive, and understudied in more ordinary situations. 1,201 American adults described up to five New Year’s resolutions and reported on their goal pursuit after six months and one year. Explicit goal disengagement was very rare and occurred in less than 7% of goals at six months and one year. More often, people took breaks and discontinued pursuit (e.g., simply devoting no effort and commitment to the goal, not often or recently working on the goal). People did not often make a deliberate decision to quit, but for nearly one quarter of goals, people thought about it. People who scored higher in a measure of self-regulatory skill (Trait Self-Control) tended to discontinue pursuit less often. There was not evidence that when they did, they felt better about it than their less-skilled counterparts. This research documents phenomena that fall between quitting and persistence. In doing so, it highlights the value of studying goal phenomena in everyday contexts, and the need for theoretical and empirical work that clarifies the defining qualities and processes of goal disengagement and adjacent phenomena as they occur in the context of people’s genuinely held goals.