Do your friends feature in your goals?

Or why relationship resolutions are worth making

A very happy new year. To mark the turning of the calendar, I planned to bring you a piece on the 2024 words of the year this week. But a bad case of Twixmas-itis (definition: an addiction to doing nothing) means it remains half-written on my laptop (my word for 2025: finish). Instead, I’ve dug this piece out of the archives from this time last year. Emma Bradshaw - a motivation and wellbeing researcher at Australian Catholic University in Sydney is one of the most fascinating people I’ve ever interviewed and her research into the value of setting intrinsic goals (those driven by relationships, health and growth) versus the extrinsic kind (those driven by wealth, image and fame) has been personally invaluable. Looking forward to being back in your inboxes with some new work soon. In the meantime, I hope you find Emma’s work as useful as I did.

I was into hour seven of my one of my top three hangovers when I decided this would be the year I would crack my relationship with alcohol. What makes this cliché all the more tired is that it played out on the 1^st January. The night that proceeded it was up there with one of the best. Six of us had gathered at my friend’s house for dinner – with dessert descending into kitchen karaoke. I was into the second verse of Jolene when we noticed it was 2023.

One bad night’s sleep later, as reliably as the midnight fireworks, the hangxiety exploded. So potent is the kind that knocks on your door on New Years Day that it’s been dubbed – in at least one December press release - ‘Auld Langxiety’. By the time I’d polished off my second takeaway of the day – digesting soundtracked by catastrophising - I vowed that this year would be different. Determined that the resolution would outlive the hangover, I downloaded one app to log my drinks, another premised on the neuroscience of behaviour change. That the latter was paid-for by a monthly subscription only added to the incentive to use it.

Fast-forward to the 1^st January this year and I was, if not hangover-free, then capable of cooking my own tea. The evening followed the same formula of friends, food and flawless pop music (butchered by less-than-flawless vocal talent). But I ate more than I drank and had my last espresso martini at midnight. I spent the rest of the week drinking the fridge dry of the booze we ended up with before climbing on the wagon, where I’ll stay for the foreseeable – with the exception of my mid-month birthday, which I’ll celebrate with a glass of something that makes me feel fancy.

The change in my drinking is subtle; imperceptible to anyone but me. I’m not sober, nor do I have any immediate ambition to be. But true to my predictably-timed mission, I’ve changed my relationship with alcohol. These days, I drink to socialise, rather than to relax – a habit loop created by locked down Negronis in the bath that’s been harder to unlearn than any other; with the exception of weddings, I almost always stop at three; and I turn off the booze tap completely during the months, like this one, when life requires more energy – a boost that total abstinence reliably (if annoyingly) delivers.

Goal keeping

If I sound insufferable, it’s hard not to in the context of alcohol - so entangled are our sobriety-morality wires. But I think what separates the last 12 months from the many (many) alcohol ambitions that proceeded it is the reframing of the goal from being rooted in the outcome (my skin will look banging! I’ll save so much money!) to being about the (brace yourself) ‘journey’; a realisation I arrive at midway through Zooming with a woman who’s spent more time thinking about this distinction than most. Because while I was bulk-buying Lucky Saint and telling anyone who would listen about my energy levels, Emma Bradshaw was studying the impact of different types of goals on wellbeing.

For a study, published on this day last year, the motivation and wellbeing researcher at Australian Catholic University in Sydney, together with her colleagues, analysed more than 90 pieces of research with the ambition of evaluating the relative merits of intrinsic aspirations (those driven from within; relationships, health, growth) versus extrinsic aspirations (those driven by external factors; wealth, image, fame). The team found that while intrinsic goals were reliably linked with feelings of wellbeing, prioritising extrinsic goals was linked with a cost. While there’s a place for both, that you’re having a nice time while you’re doing it means that a happy by-product of the intrinsic goal is that you’re also likely to stick with it and, therefore, ‘achieve’ it.

When we spoke on my last working day before Christmas – Friday morning in London, Friday night in Sydney (I did apologise for disturbing her festive peace) - I asked Emma how to discern an intrinsic goal from an extrinsic one. ‘That’s something we don’t do a particularly good job of tackling in the evidence – because, ultimately, there could be a whole range of goals on that map of intrinsic to extrinsic.’ She gives the example of losing weight and, yes, slashing your units, as goals that are ostensibly about health that could be pursued for aesthetic, reputational or financial reasons. ‘But if the journey toward the goal will be inherently rewarding, regardless of “getting” the goal, that’s the distinguishing feature between an intrinsic goal and an extrinsic goal.’

Needs must

If last year’s goal was accidentally intrinsic, I want this year’s to be more intentional – and not just because it’s my word of the year (a declaration that prompted more eye-rolls from my family than anything else I came out with over Christmas). When I launched this newsletter back in September, it was with a single goal in mind: I wanted to learn tools that could help me feel closer to my friends. But like anyone doing something new and scary, I had ambitions for the ‘thing’, too - ambitions rooted in how it would be perceived. I wanted people to like it, both virtually and IRL; I wanted to grow my subscribers; and I wanted it be successful – whatever that arbitrary metric meant. ‘There isn’t anything wrong with having extrinsic goals,’ Emma assures me. ‘The research suggests that it begins to affect your wellbeing when you prioritise extrinsic goals over the intrinsic kind.’

That last sentence hit me like a New Years Day hangover. Because while September and October passed in a haze of meticulously scheduled social plans, I can pinpoint – almost to the week – when my ‘priorities’ got skewed, and with it, my work/life balance. If it started with refreshing the stats on my dashboard, it wasn’t long before I turned my attention to the stats of others – and sleuthing subscriber-counts like a spurned partner stalks their ex, the burden of comparison weighed heavy. The weekend I hit 500 subscribers – a milestone that had come to feel important – I allowed myself to linger in pride for half a day before sitting down at my laptop again.

Emma tells me about Self-Determination Theory (SDT) – a theory her study’s findings were consistent with. Comprised of six mini-theories, SDT posits that humans have three psychological needs underpinning their motivation, growth and flourishing: competence, relatedness and autonomy. While intrinsic aspirations help you satisfy those needs, pursuing extrinsic goals makes it harder for you to meet them. One reason? ‘We see an escalation of expectations,’ she explains. ‘Once you have an extrinsic thing, you tend to compare yourself to new social models, meaning you need more of that thing to keep finding it juicy.’

In a piece for the Atlantic, Harvard Professor Arthur Brooks terms this effect the ‘Tyson Paradox’, after the boxer professed in an interview that he deemed it necessary to give up ‘almost all your happiness’ in order to accomplish your goals. With this statement, Tyson hits upon the other issue with prioritising extrinsic goals: what you’re not doing when you’re going after them. As Emma puts it: ‘There’s a tendency to crowd out opportunities for the things you find meaningful, such as connection’. Or turn down plans with friends so you can stay home and write about your social life (the irony).

Added values

I ask Emma for her advice on how to do some priority paperwork. Setting goals with intrinsic motivation in mind begins with identifying your values, she explains. ‘If you give people an opportunity to ask themselves what it is that they care about, they will automatically start to think about more intrinsic things,’ she tells me, before proceeding to prove her point. She asks me what is it that I value (friendship), what I want to change about my relationships (create deeper connections) and what I’d like to do more of within those relationships (become a better listener - something Emma’s advice is also helping me with; more next time). If we were doing this exercise outside, she tells me, it would be even more powerful. ‘Nature has been found to be both autonomy-satisfying and relatedness-satisfying. So thinking about what you value and going for a walk outside is the most effective way to become more intrinsically inspired.’  

Values nailed, she suggests choosing a goal that you’ll enjoy working towards, rather than one that hinges solely on the outcome – and considering how you might hope to meet your needs along the way. ‘That means picking something for which you might hope to build competence, picking something autonomously – so something you're naturally interested in – and picking something you can do with other people, so you're building relatedness along the way.’ I think this is where relational goals come into their own. Back to the Atlantic piece and Brooks cites research which found that the goals most likely to defeat the Tyson Paradox are those centred on giving and getting love; perhaps because whether you want to make new friends, become more involved in your local community or forge a deeper connection with your spouse, colleagues or siblings, there is no final destination; the joy is only ever in the doing - and never more so, than when you’re doing karaoke.