How to make your New Year’s resolutions more successful:

Rather than nailing down a number (lose 20 pounds, say, or save $100 more per month), itâs best to keep those goals a little vague if you want to succeed, says a new study to be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science.

The team â comprised of husband and wife Himanshu and Arul Mishra, assistant professors of marketing at the University of Utah, and Baba Shiv of Stanford Graduate School of Business â designed experiments to look at improvements in mental acuity, physical strength and weight loss. They found in each case that when study participants were given a vague marker of improvement rather than a specific one, they showed a much higher rate of improvement.

And:

So you can trick yourself into improvement? Pretty much. The authors call the mental distortion âakin to placebo effects.â

Source: Stanford