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It's the 10% Happier podcast.

I'm Dan Harris.

Hey, hey, Dan here, coming at you with a brief solo pod, no guest. It's just me.

It's a new year, and many of you are contemplating resolutions, and yet, by the end of the month, statistically, most of you will have bailed on these resolutions.

It's an annual boom and bust cycle that can be terrible for your motivation and for your self-esteem.

Over the last eight years, as the host of this show, I've interviewed many of the world's leading experts on habit formation.

In this episode,

I'm going to give you my top 10 takeaways, all based in the science of behavior change.

The goal is to put you in the best position to succeed at keeping your resolutions or making change at any time of year. Let me start with the bad news. Making and breaking habits can be

diabolically difficult. Evolution designed our brains

to excel at short-term survival tasks, like spotting threats, finding food, and finding mates.

That wiring leaves us ill-equipped for the slow, steady work required to reach long-term goals,

which often do not provide any immediate rewards.

That may sound discouraging, but in a perverse way, it's actually good news.

A lot of us try to make or break habits.

We fail, and then we tell ourselves a whole story about how we are uniquely deficient in this regard.

But there's nothing wrong with you.

You don't have to blame yourself.

You can blame evolution. And there's more good news. Even though our brains are designed to solve

immediate problems, that doesn't mean you can't meet long-term goals. It just means that you have to

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