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So how to get unstuck? Here's where psychology and a little spirituality can help. Throughout time, religion has been about not just worship but also life lessons, self-improvement and redemption, with earthly accountability to the community and congregation to help keep us in line. It's hard to cheat a neighbor who sits next to you in church. It's hard to skip an exercise class organized by your congregation. Alcoholics Anonymous was launched in the 1930s with a 12-step model based on the same idea. Here, too, getting the support and, if necessary, the scolding of a group leads to better results than what AA members call white-knuckle sobriety--when someone who puts the cork in the bottle relies on sheer tooth-gritting willpower to resist pulling it back out.
A 2012 study in the journal Obesity explored the power of the collective, looking at the weight-loss rate among people in groups who succeeded at a 12-week diet. The participants were 12,000 people who took part in the 2009 Shape Up Rhode Island fitness campaign. They divided themselves into 987 five-to-11-person teams, stayed in regular communication over the Internet and competed with other teams to see who could lose the most at the end of 12 weeks.
In general, the researchers found there was a kind of virtuous loop among the most successful groups. The more pounds any individual member of a high-weight-loss group dropped, the likelier it was that other members would follow suit and shed more pounds too. At the end of the study, members of the most motivated and successful groups lost 5% of their body weight--a healthy and maintainable target that members of a lot of the other groups missed. Crunching the data, the researchers concluded that any person from the 5% group would have lost only 3.8% of body weight if moved to a less successful group. In other words, it wasn't just the quality of the individual's resolve; the quality of the group's mattered too.
A 2008 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine took a similar approach, looking at the dynamics of smoking behavior in a large social network. Harvard's Dr. Nicholas Christakis, the lead author of the paper (and a TIME Ideas contributor), is a pioneer in the young field of social networks and public health. He and others have found that a whole range of health issues, from depression to smoking to obesity, can be powerfully influenced by the other people in your social web, including--remarkably--some you've never met.
There's no telepathy involved in that. Perhaps you decided to quit smoking because you saw a friend succeed at it. But she quit because her husband, whom you know slightly, had done so. And he quit because he was following the example of an office friend you don't know at all. Twang one strand in the web and it can cause vibrations everywhere. The 2008 study explored more direct, first-person contact, but the results were still striking: people whose spouse quit smoking were 67% less likely to start or continue smoking; they were 36% less likely if a friend quit, 34% if a work colleague quit, and 25% if a sibling did.