Along with popping champagne and singing Auld Lang Syne, for many people, making resolutions is a New Year’s tradition. Each year, it seems like the internet is flooded with blogs and motivational videos on how to stick to your resolutions particularly during the month of January.
The annual publishing of this content suggests many of us are not good at keeping our resolutions.
Like most things in life, I like to approach my New Year’s resolutions with science and a healthy dose of pessimism.
One study from the University of Scranton in 1985 followed 200 adults as they made their resolutions for the year. By the first week, 23 per cent of participants reported not following through. When interviewed two years later, only 19 per cent admitted to being on track.
From personal experience, I find that life just gets in the way. By February, school work becomes overwhelming and I find myself prioritizing it over personal goals. After powering through several essays and readings, I don’t have the motivation to start back from scratch.
Let’s be honest, keeping up with a resolution for a whole year can seem daunting.
So what can we do to follow through on our resolutions?
Don’t be too ambitious
Realistically, if you plan on quitting drinking cold-turkey, working out several times a week and staying on top of all your readings—essentially, overhauling your life—keeping up may be a struggle.
Habits we want to break normally develop over time, so replacing them should also be a long-term process. An article by the American Psychological Association recommends replacing habits we don’t want to continue with healthier habits over time, depending on what works for us.
Harvard Medical School published an article suggesting it’s helpful to break big resolutions into small steps.
Likewise, French philosopher Fabrice Midal urges readers to stop shooting for perfection.
“We have been brought up to forget that in real life, failure is not only inevitable but also necessary,” reads his book, The French Art of Not Giving a Sh*t. “Some cultures value mistakes; some people… include them in their résumés. They are proof that we have tried.”
Midal suggests that instead of focusing on failure, we should “accept life’s storm.”
Recognize that COVID-19 makes everything harder
My pessimism has doubled since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. It seems like it’s extra hard to keep going with simple goals like waking up early and eating healthy.
If you’re reading this, you may be aiming to smoke less cannabis or tobacco in 2022 after a year-and-a-half of overdoing it. This can be more difficult than usual while facing often changing restrictions on services like in-person counselling and social gatherings.
Resolving to smoke just one bowl less a day now and quitting once the restrictions are lifted may be a better idea than trying to go cold-turkey right away. If you rely on the assistance of your social circle to quit using drugs completely, try simply reducing your intake for the time-being.
Even resolutions like keeping a good sleep schedule and working out regularly are a lot harder when you work from home and gyms are closed.
Unfortunately, because on-and-off lockdowns are a relatively new phenomenon, little research has been done on the topic.
My advice on this is to plan around restrictions. Focus on a goal that you know will be manageable while staying at home. Perhaps instead of focusing on getting an entire workout in when you don’t have access to gym equipment, try doing at-home yoga or a few push ups in the morning.
Consider ignoring the studies (and the pessimism)
Among the successful participants of the aforementioned psychological study, conditioning themselves to associate a behaviour with a positive reward and gradual reduction in a habit were the most popular strategies to help reach their resolutions.
However, complex topics such as substance use are affected by several factors in one’s life and can’t always be solved on the morning of Jan. 1.
If anything I’ve said here isn’t working for you, ignore it and follow something that will. If you’d rather take a more optimistic outlook on your own improvement, hopefully one of these strategies will stick.
Despite the hubris of some self-help blogs, science isn’t the expert on your own self-improvement. You are.
Featured image from file.
