On our failed resolutions
It was my New Year’s resolution to get this article out some time during January.
Ah, 2015. New year, new you. At last, a chance to fix the mistakes of last year. And what better way than to set a fantastic personal goal in January, in anticipation of the year to come? Many of us would like to think that we’ll be able to ride that wave of New Year’s optimism all the way to the end and achieve self-betterment and improvement.
According to the US government, the most popular New Year’s resolutions are to lose weight, quit smoking, eat healthy, and spend time with family. [2] Oddly enough, a list of the most commonly broken New Year’s resolutions by the Times are almost identical. [1]
But surely such well-intentioned goals would yield some result. What happened to the “new you”? Surely people achieve their resolutions all the time through sheer determination and self-motivation? “Actually, they kind of don’t”, says a study by the University of Scranton (not direct quote). They came up with the depressingly low success rate of 19%, out of the 200 Americans they tracked over a period of 2 years. Most people make it through the first week. But by the end of the first month, only 64% were still chugging on. At the end of the first six months, this number was less than 40%.
Unfortunately, the same can be said for us, too. Out of the 58 secondary RCHK students we surveyed, 47 had failed to achieve one or more New Year’s resolutions at some point. Most of the remainder did not make resolutions in the first place. With such a bad track record, why do people even bother?
One reason is that it’s much easier to make a resolution than to follow through with it. You want to get along better with your siblings? Start performing well in Math class? Save money? Bam- New Year’s resolution done. But it’s not so easy to hold fast to that determination months later.
Another reason is that New Year’s resolutions just make you feel better about yourself. Timothy Pychyl, professor of psychology at Carleton University, called it “cultural procrastination”. [4] Simply the act of making a New Year’s resolution makes you feel like you’re actually doing something to work towards that goal, when in reality you haven’t done much at all. However, because you can tell yourself, “I’ve already made the resolution to do something”, rather than motivating yourself, it only gives you an excuse to put it off until later.
So, there’s no point in making resolutions after all - is that it? Not quite.
While the success rate of New Year’s resolutions remains low, John Norcross of the University of Scranton found that people who make resolutions are still 10 times more likely to achieve their goals than people who don’t. [3] What’s important is not falling into the trap of thinking “because I’ve already made a goal, I don’t have to do anything else”. While taking the initiative to solve bad habits is a step in the right direction, it’s important to follow intention with action.
Just remember that the act of setting a resolution isn’t enough. This year, let’s resolve to keep our resolutions.
Happy (VERY belated) New Year!
Sources:
[1] http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,2040218,00.html
[2] http://www.usa.gov/Citizen/Topics/New-Years-Resolutions.shtml
[3] http://apa.org/monitor/jan04/solutions.aspx
[4] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201012/why-new-years-resolutions-fail
