How long will you go before you abandon your resolution?
Break the cycle of unreachable resolutions
Its the first week of January and the Internet is rife with everyone’s new years resolutions. What are yours? Are you going to get organized this year? Are you going to lose ten pounds?
Did you know that only 8% of people who make new years resolutions keep them? And, out of 100 people who made resolutions, more than half of them will abandon them after six months.
The problem with resolutions is that people aren’t making the right goals.
When you don’t make the right goal its easy to lose sight of it and then abandon it completely with an air of guilt.
Make a resolution that you can keep:
- Focus on why you’re making the resolutions you are.
- Smart small to create new habits and build on them over time
- Don’t punish yourself for making enough progress
Focus on why and not on what
Goals like “Lose ten pounds” don’t really explore the motivation behind the sudden desire. Do you want to lose ten pounds to relieve some societal pressures that exist around body image? Are you trying to treat your body well after years of poor health habits? Did you hear somewhere that exercising relieves stress and you could really blow off some steam? Do you think you’ll finally achieve happiness?
It might be tempting to make arbitrary goals like lose ten, twenty, thirty pounds, but take some time to figure out why you want to make them in the first place. Think of it like treating the problem rather than just the symptoms. Its much easier to take steps to reach goals that reflect your real motivation.
The disconnect between the why and how happens all the time. This is because we are not always aware of why we want to do something, just that we want to do it.
For example, if you are actually looking to take care of yourself, losing ten pounds may not be the only answer. Things to also take into account is diet, sleep and stress management.
New Year, Old You
If you’ve never been one to work out everyday or eat the right food day in and day out it’s going to be hard to change who you are in order to reach the benchmark.
We talked about making a goal that is more inline with your personal motivation so how can you take steps that are not overwhelming?
Nir Eyal is an author that explores human behavior and he wrote a great piece about setting better goals. Basically, creating new habits takes a lot of brain power so they are hard to maintain over time.
The way around this is to reduce the activity to its simplest step so it takes out all the difficulty of thinking about it. If you want to floss everyday, start with one tooth. If you are trying to exercise everyday, start with one push-up.
Think of it like stairs. We need to take stairs one step at a time because its easier than trying to climb the to the top all at once. These first steps become your foundation. Each step after builds on itself until you get to the top.
Don’t Punish Yourself for Making Enough Progress
This one is the biggest reason why people don’t continue with their resolutions past January. Setting overly specific goals like “go to the gym three times a week” are easy to loose track of if you are not used to going to the gym that often.
If you set a benchmark you can’t reach, then you start to feel ashamed and distance yourself from the source of guilt. Going to the gym gets harder because you are disappointed and burned out.
Anything is better than nothing.
If you can make it to the gym once a week where before you went once every few months, that a reason to praise yourself for making progress.
Keep track of what your are doing from week to week to keep the momentum going. When you are starting to feel the sting of guilt that you haven’t achieved your goal in the first month, remember that success is not always linear and your strategy shouldn’t be either. Keep going and adjust your tactics as necessary. Best of luck!
