A goal you can't film: what avoidance-goal research says about 'stop snoozing'
Approach vs avoidance goals: people with more 'stop' goals reported lower well-being in 1990s studies. A five-row rewrite table and a camera test turn them into goals you can finish.
In this article4 sections
A sticky note on the bathroom mirror reads STOP SNOOZING. It has been there for three weeks. Nothing about it can be photographed, and that is most of its problem.
The research on goals suggests a rewrite. People who pursued more avoidance goals, aimed at preventing something, reported lower well-being than people who pursued approach goals, aimed at achieving something. So “stop snoozing” becomes “be at the kitchen window by 6:45”, an action with a place, a time and an outcome a camera could confirm.
What did the avoidance-goal studies find?
Three papers from the 1990s carry most of the weight. Coats, Janoff-Bulman and Alpert (1996), in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, ran two studies on approach versus avoidance goals. According to the publisher’s record, the first linked a larger share of avoidance goals to lower self-esteem and optimism and to more depression, and the second manipulated how a goal was framed and found that perceived success and satisfaction differed between the two framings.
Elliot, Sheldon and Church (1997), in the same journal, reported two studies following people across a semester. Higher neuroticism predicted adopting avoidance strivings, and people who rated their own life skills lower were more likely to take on avoidance projects. Avoidance goals went with lower well-being at a single point in time and with a decline in well-being from the start of the semester to its end. Per the publisher’s record, perceived progress mediated the direct effects, so part of the cost ran through how much progress people felt they were making. The paper is at doi.org/10.1177/0146167297239001.
A third paper, Elliot and Sheldon (1997) in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, looked at avoidance achievement goals and what followed from pursuing them over a semester. I could read only the opening line of its abstract, so I am citing it for the question it asked and nothing more.
Why would a goal’s wording matter? One reading is that an avoidance goal succeeds as an absence. A morning without a snooze leaves no event behind, so the day offers no sign of progress, while a missed morning arrives with a loud one. That is my interpretation of how the findings fit together, and none of these studies tested it for alarms. A neighbouring split, between goals aimed at looking capable and goals aimed at learning, appeared in children after praise: in Mueller and Dweck’s Study 1, 67% of those told they were smart chose performance goals, against 8% of those praised for effort.
How do you turn a stop-goal into a start-goal?
Five common ones, rewritten. The right-hand column is what a camera would see.
| Avoidance version | Approach version | What the camera shows |
|---|---|---|
| Stop snoozing | Be standing at the kitchen window by 6:45 | You, upright, daylight behind you |
| Stop wasting time online | Write for 25 minutes at the desk before opening a browser | Open document, closed laptop lid or clean tab bar |
| Don’t eat junk | Put one cooked vegetable and one protein on the plate at dinner | The plate |
| Stop being so sedentary | Walk 20 minutes after lunch | Route screenshot or a street photo |
| Don’t stay up late | Be in bed with the light off by 11:00 | The dark room, phone charging across the floor |
The rewrite works because the approach version names an action, and an action has an edge: it starts, it ends, and you either did it or did not.
Two habits make the rewrite stick. Keep the old sentence nearby for a week, so you can see the new one is the same ambition with a handle on it. And choose a size you could manage on a bad day: twenty minutes of walking sounds modest until the day it rains, so a ten-minute floor with twenty as the aim gives you something to count on the worst day as well as the best.
Can a stranger tell it happened?
The camera test is a single question. Could a photo or ten-second video convince a stranger that this goal was met today? “Stop wasting time” fails, because nobody can film the absence of a wasted hour. “Write for 25 minutes at the desk” passes.
A goal that passes is also one your friends can check without trusting your memory, which is the logic behind measurable habits that others can see. A goal that fails usually needs a number, a place or a clock time added, a point the goal-setting literature makes at length in Locke and Latham’s case against “do your best”. Whether goals deserve this much attention at all is a separate fight, and Clear and Locke-Latham read side by side sorts out where they really disagree.
For wake-ups, DontSnooze applies the same test mechanically: the alarm asks for a short video within 30 seconds of ringing.
What these studies cannot tell you
Most of this evidence is correlational and drawn from semester-long studies of students, so it cannot show that rewording your own goal will raise your mood. The one experiment I could confirm, Coats and colleagues’ framing manipulation, changed perceived success and satisfaction in a lab, not outcomes in anyone’s real morning. Neuroticism also predicted avoidance goals in the Elliot, Sheldon and Church data, which means some of the link may be personality rather than wording.
A reasonable use of the findings is modest: rewrite one goal this week, film it, and see whether a daily yes or no feels different from daily guilt. If you want to know why a clip settles the question better than your own report of the morning, that argument is made here.