Keeping Your New Year’s Resolutions

Fireworks light up the sky in Sydney, Australia on New Year's EvePhoto by Christopher Chan - http://flic.kr/p/4h847T

It’s a brand new year. And that means a brand new you! New Year’s is an opportunity to reflect on the past year, to remember the memories you’ll cherish forever and the moments you’d like to forget. It is also a perfect chance for everyone to make a commitment towards improving themselves and their quality of life. Every one of us has a habit we’d like to quell, a new skill we’d like to learn, something about us that we’d like to improve, and every New Year’s we draw up all our willpower and make our best attempt to keep these New Year’s Resolutions.

Most of us make the same resolutions. We promise to lose weight, to get better organized, to make more time for friends. Smokers promise to quit, drinkers promise to cut back, students promise to do better in school, adults promise not to let work control their lives. We promise to go back to that old passion, that thing we once loved that somehow got lost amidst everything else we do now, whether its cooking or singing or dancing. We promise to make our lives more interesting, by learning a foreign language, taking piano lessons, studying art. On January 1st, the new year is a blank slate, and we have all big plans of what to fill it with.

Yet, most of us fall short of our self-imposed goals. One study based on New Year’s resolutions in 2007 found that only 12% actually completed their resolutions, though 52% initially thought they would be able to. All that hope from January 1st slowly fades away through February as that chocolate cake calls our name after a bad day at work or we’re too tired from all our homework to practice the piano. By April, we’re back to where we were in December, waiting for next New Year’s to roll around when, we promise ourselves, we’ll make a better effort.

So how can we prevent ourselves from failing at our goals? A few simple suggestions when making your resolutions this week:

1. Make your goal specific. “Losing weight” is probably the most popular resolution, but such a vague directive for yourself is easy to lose track of and difficult to measure. Instead, try “lose 2 pounds a week for six months” or “only eat dessert once a week.” This way there is no gray area, you know right away what you need to do and how well you have done. Making your goal specific will make it much easier to reach.
2. Make your goal public. Tell your friends. Make it your facebook status. Tweet it. Putting yourself out there will push you towards your goal, since if you fail, everyone will know. Your friends can both help you reach it and keep you on the right track.
3. Inspire yourself. If you have made a resolution that you truly believe will make you a better person, remind yourself of that as much as possible. If your goal is to learn French cooking, make crème brulee your desktop background. If your goal is to dunk on a basketball hoop, watch a highlight reel of Michael Jordan before your morning workout. If your goal is to stop smoking, read a Surgeon General’s warning after you put your kids to sleep. Prove to yourself that all the hard work is easily worth the reward. Constantly keep in mind the opportunities that filled you with such wonder on New Year’s Eve.

Gym memberships often rise sharply in January, but fall later in the year as people give up on their New Year's resolutions

If you feel you want more help in keeping your New Year’s Resolution, a number of websites have emerged to help you make a more commitment. Most prominent is stickK.com which allows you to “place a contract with yourself” pledging to fulfill a certain goal, as judged by you or a third party. If you fail, they’ll charge your credit card and make a donation to the charity of your choice. If you really want to motivate yourself, you can pick an anti-charity, and when you fall short you will be financially supporting a group you dislike or disapprove of. Popular examples are the NRA and the George W. Bush Presidential Library. Nothing will keep you on the treadmill like the thought of betraying your ideals if you press the stop button.

In the end, a New Year’s Resolution is a yearly ritual in which we acknowledge that, as far as we’ve come during the past year, there is always more we can accomplish. We set for ourselves a personal objective, one way we think we can make this next year better than the last. So this New Year’s Eve, think carefully about how you want to spend the next year, think about why you want to pick that as your resolution, the steps you can take towards getting there, and the people and resources who can help you along the way. After you’re done watching the festivities and staying up all night, get some rest. But don’t sleep in too late. You’ve got a lot of work to do.

No related posts.