New Years resolutions have never really appealed to me. The trouble with them is that the part of my brain that makes those long-term plans seems not to be on speaking terms with the part that’s in charge of choosing, on a given Saturday morning, whether I will study for a certification exam or sleep until eleven and then mysteriously laze away a few hours on the Internet.

A book I’ve been reading, Nudge, dishes out some research-based realism on the misfires between our plans for the future and our impulsive actions in the spur of the moment (and the spur of the ice cream container). The “planning part” of the brain is awful at imagining what it feels like to actually sit down to cram for that test, or hold back from the culinary skydive of that triple chocolate cake. In fact, according to the surprisingly hilarious Stumbling Upon Happiness, we regularly confuse what we’re feeling right now with what we’re trying to imagine in the future—which is why every year, right after finishing a gargantuan Thanksgiving meal at 3pm, my entire family insists that we will never want to eat again, and then we promptly shuffle off to a nearby diner around 7:30.

For whatever reason, the best way to actually succeed in making a change is to make the change. This  way of putting it sounds moronically simple, but what I mean is that taking action to change makes us much more likely to keep it up than making a detailed plan for the coming year. It probably all comes down to the path of least resistance. Our brains like to resist changes, and so if we get ourselves into the groove of doing something, we’re liable to keep doing it (however grudgingly) rather than stop.

All of these thoughts make me prefer New Years revolutions. If the advancing years lend me a sudden drive to change something, I had better do it quickly while I still have enough momentum to get over the bump.

Resolution comes from a Latin root meaning “to loosen,” which makes me feel that I’m better off “resolving” my shoelaces than resolving to write a novel. Revolution comes from the Latin for “turn.” So to make a New Years revolution is to turn your life, to change course, rather than tugging at the loose edges.

Just think. Would the American Resolution have gone down in history the way the American Revolution has?