Failing New Year’s Resolutions Are Not The End Of The World — Laugh At Them!

If you’ve already broken your cherished New Year’s Resolution, don’t fret, here’s hope.

Date: February 01, 2008

Category: Everything Else

If you’ve already broken your cherished New Year’s Resolution, don’t fret, here’s hope. 200802-Photo4-Laughing

It’s painful irony that the new calendar year turns over smack dab in the middle of winter—the one time of the year when most people can’t rouse themselves to clean their bathrooms, much less make ambitious, life-changing, behavioral U-turns.

But most of us—whether they’re engraved in stone or simply muttered under our breath—make New Year’s resolutions.

Psychologists say it's the tone of the holiday season that makes people want to drop their typically poor behavior and see “hope” for positive change, better health, a cleaner house and more well-behaved children, etc., etc., etc. with the new year’s arrival.

Don’t fret if you’ve failed already, not even a quarter into the New Year. There is a simple scientific explanation.

In one of columnist Dave Barry’s New Year’s columns, he reports that a team of psychologists conducted a study in which they monitored the New Year’s resolutions of about 275 people. After one week, the psychologists found that 92 percent of the people were keeping their resolutions; after two weeks, they had no idea what happened, because the psychologists had quit monitoring.

“We just lost our motivation,” they reported. “Also, we found ourselves eating Twinkies by the case.”

So, you see, keeping resolutions can be harder than clay dirt in the hot sun of August. But Barry says you CAN do it if you follow these practical tips:

Be Realistic

Many people give up because they “set their sights too high.” In making a New Year’s resolution, pick a goal that you can reasonably expect to attain, as we see in these examples:

Unrealistic Goal: “In the next month, I will lose 25 pounds.”
Realistic Goal: “Over the next year, taking it an ounce or two at a time, I will gain 25 pounds, and my face will bloat like a military life raft.”

Unrealistic Goal: “I will learn to speak Chinese.”
Realistic Goal: “I will order some Chinese food.”

Unrealistic Goal: “I will read a good book.”
Realistic Goal: “I will examine the outsides of some good books, and then waddle over to the part of the bookstore where they sell pastries.”

Think Positive

To succeed, you must believe in yourself. Write this motivational statement in large letters on a piece of paper and tape it someplace where you will see it often:

“I CAN do it, and I WILL do it!.... starting next year!”

Playwright, novelist and poet Oscar Wilde explained it best when he said, “Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account.”

Others say the best approach is to scratch resolutions that are most likely to dissolve into an afterthought when nobody is looking. Cross off the ones TV commercials have berated or guilted you into doing and dump the ones you know your heart is not really into.

Look at your remaining list. If you feel strongly that these resolutions will still be important to you in April when you’re trying to get your tax returns done, you’re on your way.

Most feel that carrying out resolutions is like trying to lose weight while you're sitting in a Dairy Queen. Or in the case of some people, it’s like standing in front of a big batch of super-stuffed baked apples ala mode.

Remember the words of Rachel Ray, who recently spent time on her television cooking show with a fitness expert who suggested that to lose weight one must spend an hour a day at the gym, five days a week:

“Hmmm,” Ray said. “Guess I’ll have to work on that one.”

You can, however, rationalize weight loss issues in the words of Jay Leno, who said, “Now there are more overweight people in America than average-weight people. So overweight people are now average… which means, you have met your New Year's resolution.”

It’s All About ‘Hope’

Michael Penn, a psychology researcher and professor at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania said that by making New Year resolutions people are actually trying to reinforce a feeling of hope.

That’s why most resolutions are pretty much unattainable.

“If the goals that human beings have are immediately reachable, those goals do not inspire hope,” Penn said. “Hope helps make people feel less vulnerable—and that’s good for us.”

New Year's resolutions reinforce the long-standing, centuries-long hope that we can overcome our collective problems, and provide tremendous impetus to the belief that human beings are fundamentally good, and that they fundamentally long for meaningful change, Penn said.

“Without hope that we are moving forward, people become despaired,” Penn said.

So, says Penn, even if all of our New Year’s Resolutions fail, we’re helping to keep the hope alive. And that’s a perfect resolution.

But seriously….

A few tips for keeping New Year’s Resolutions….
start again even if you’ve broken them already

• Wait until spring. Sometimes the best way to accomplish a New Year’s resolution is to make it at a time of year of your choosing, rather than the one dictated by the calendar. May 1 is a good alternate date, since the change of season will neatly coincide with the change you’re hoping to accomplish in yourself.
Aim low. It goes without saying that most New Year’s resolutions are easier announced (or written) than done—but if you set the bar too high, you’re doomed from the start. Instead of a sweeping declaration like “I will lose 30 pounds by April and finally fit into that dress,” target a goal that’s more attainable, like losing 10 or 15 pounds.
Don’t overload yourself. It’s difficult enough for the average person to follow through on one ambitious New Year’s resolution; why on earth would you saddle yourself with three or four? Choose the most pressing issue at hand—losing weight, finding a girlfriend, improving your relationship with your parents—and concentrate on that. Trying to do everything simultaneously practically guarantees failure across the board.
Let others be your watchdog. One school of thought says that New Year’s resolutions are best kept to oneself, but look at it this way: the more people to whom you announce your resolution (say, to get out of your dead-end job by spring), the more people there’ll be to prod you along if you fall behind. There’s no shame in seeking help if you can’t accomplish your resolution on your own.
Reward yourself. Following through on a New Year’s resolution is rarely easy, so a little Pavlovian conditioning goes a long way. If you’ve resolved to shop less, stroke yourself for not buying those shoes by springing for a steaming hot cappuccino at the mall. If you’ve resolved to be nicer to people, buy yourself a nice jacket after enduring that tedious cocktail party without delivering any insults.
Go ahead, you CAN do it… why wait till next year?!