New Years Resolutions

I’m not a huge fan of New Years resolutions as I believe we should always be focused on a constant state of growth…but why do so many people fail at them?  The reality is forming new mental, physical, or spiritual habits is not easy.  Psychologist Jeremy Dean gives some great insight in the article below into how to do resolutions the right way.

Why New Year’s Resolutions Fail (and How to Do Them The Right Way)

 

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.

This well-known quote, from philosopher George Santayana, wasn’t about New Year’s Resolutions, but it might well have been.

There’s a familiar feeling that accompanies those promises we make to ourselves around New Year. It’s déjà vu. Didn’t I make those self-same promises to myself last year? And maybe even the year before?

Perhaps some of the participants in a 1985 University of Scranton study on New Year’s resolutions had that sense of déjà vu. The same as any other year, they made promises to themselves about how they would change in 1986. The difference was that that year they confessed their resolutions to psychological researchers and were tracked over the coming months.

The results of the study do not make pretty reading. Sixty percent of people had given up after six months and who knows how many of the remaining 40 percent secretly gave up but didn’t want to admit it.

One of the main reasons New Year’s resolutions are so hard to change is that we come up against rock hard habits. Typical targets for resolutions like healthy eating, quitting smoking and taking up exercise are very difficult habits to alter because these patterns of behaviour have been built up over many years.

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