If you've decided you want to get rid of your debts but are having trouble doing it, that might be because you haven't prepared your brain for it.

To free yourself of oppressive debt, you should treat yourself and make yourself feel good. I'm not talking about indulging yourself once again with the credit card. Rather, you need to give yourself hope that you can really chop away at that debt mess until it's gone.

And research by two assistant professors of marketing from the Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management provides the way.

David Gal and Blakeley McShane tested advice often given to people loaded with debt, and found the advice lacking. They concluded you should ignore the popular suggestion that you get rid of debt by paying off your biggest loan or credit card balance first. Going after the card with the largest balance is likely to be discouraging, perhaps making you feel defeated along the multiyear process of paying off all debts and maybe causing you to give up.

Instead, Gal and McShane found it's more effective to give yourself a quick success. Pay off your smallest balance or loan, and then move to the next small one and do the same. Each might take awhile, but the sooner you can get rid of one and move to the next, the more you will feel a sense of accomplishment and control. Your success will help motivate you to stick with your plan and make it to the end of paying off debt entirely.

Gal and McShane dug into the behavior of almost 6,000 people who had gone to a debt settlement company for help in getting rid of debt. Such firms can be sketchy, and individuals must be cautious about trusting some of them. The firms typically have clients make a single monthly payment into an account devoted to the person's debts, and with time the firm tries to negotiate reductions with lenders.

Only about 43 percent of people make it to the end of the process successfully as they make payments over an average period of three to four years. About 30 percent of people give up before the debt settlement firm is able to negotiate a single reduction, and the consequence can be bankruptcy.

By observing the behavior of people dealing with the Freedom Financial Network, the researchers were able to see how individuals respond to paying off debts.

On a numbers basis, it doesn't matter if people pay off small or large debts first, although sometimes a person can reduce his or her overall debt load the most if they get rid of big debts with high interest rates. But, psychologically, people need to feel like they are making progress. That's especially true when a person faces a long process, like paying off debt over a few years.

The researchers also found that people were motivated to keep working on their debts if they consistently paid down the smallest balances. For example, Gal and McShane found that one year after enrolling in the debt settlement program, clients were 14 percent more likely to complete the program after experiencing small successes than people who paid down random balances of various sizes. People were even more motivated if they were eliminating the smallest balances instead of the largest.

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Personal Finance: Provide yourself hope while eliminating debt