New Year’s Resolutions…Is it Even Worth It?!
January 1st 2016: I promise to stop smoking
January 3rd 2016: smoked a cigarette…
With January coming to an end, let’s all take a moment and look back at the promises we made ourselves just a month ago. January 1st is the day that most of us, including myself, naively try to convince ourselves that this year is going to be the year. “I’m finally going to fit into those skinny jeans I bought last month (without trying them on because, let’s face it, the lighting in those changing rooms can never make you look good)” or “I’m going to save more money this year” or my personal favorite “I’m really going to try harder this semester”. Flash forward a couple of months, spring is here… those skinny jeans are still tucked away nicely in your drawer because life’s stressors has you eating your worries away, you’re more broke than you have been at any other point in your life and of course your GPA should actually spell out S-O-S.
So why do we do it, year after year after year knowing that we will only disappoint ourselves? Is it possible for us to make a new year’s resolution and actually follow through with it for more than a couple of weeks? Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner and colleagues in a study called “Paradoxical effects of thought suppression” put the concept to the test by instructing people to suppress thoughts of a white bear. During suppression the participants were unsuccessful and a white-bear thought occurred on average once per minute. This is known as ironic mental control.
Paradoxically, the harder you try not to do something, the likelier you are to want to do it even more. This means that the more you try to not to eat junk food so you can fit in your skinny jeans, the more that doughnut will call out your name. The harder you try constrict your bank account in a world where material desires are abundant, the more time you will spend dreaming about all the things you want to buy and the more you repeat to yourself that this semester will be your best while not thinking about the hit your social life will take, the likelier it is that those textbooks you spent a fortune on will probably never be opened.
Luckily for us it’s not all bad news. There actually is a solution to the downward spiral we find ourselves in every New Year. Daniel Wegner says that in order to be successful at our New Year’s resolutions we need to keep them positive and affirmative.
January 1st, 2017: I promise to make my New Year’s resolutions positive and affirmative
“Insert Date Here, 2017”: to be continued…
