In a drunken, exuberant haze, you raised your glass of champagne to the sky and vowed this year was going to be different. Better. High on the new year and its seemingly endless potential, you declared something vague but hopeful.
“This year, I will do some of my readings!”
“This year, I will go to the gym!”
“This year, I will read the newspaper.”
And once the monotony of January set in, so did your complacency. It’s a common problem, according to Tim Pychyl, an associate professor of psychology at Carleton.
Recent research has found only 14 per cent of people keep their resolutions for a full year, Pychyl said.
“I’d summarize it as ‘hope springs eternal.’ We always want to have the hope of change, but a lot of habits aren’t easy to change,” he said. “We call them resolutions, but often they don’t have much resolve in them.”
Pychyl emphasized the biggest problem people face when it comes time to keeping their resolutions is letting themselves skip out on their goals for the day because they “need to feel like it.”
“If I asked you any given day ‘Hey, what do you feel like doing today?’ you wouldn’t say ‘I feel like writing an essay today.’ No day do you ever say that,” he said. “I think everyone has to wrestle with that—that you’re motivational state does not have to match the task at hand.”
We all want to change ourselves
According to Ian Newby-Clark, a professor of psychology at the University of Guelph, trying to change deep-seated habits is also part of the problem.
“Habits are highly ingrained behaviours, and that makes them very difficult to change . . . It’s kind of semiautomatic, or barely conscious. You decide ‘Okay, I’m going to brush my teeth’ and you find yourself doing it. There’s not a lot of thought that goes into it,” he said.
“That’s why they are the way they are. Because you don’t want to have to spend a lot of time deliberating about ‘Okay, how exactly am I going to get my teeth cleaned today? Oh yes, there’s this thing called a toothbrush.’”
Of course, if something you’re doing habitually isn’t working for you, like eating poorly or procrastinating on your schoolwork, Newby-Clark warned against resolving to get rid of those habits without having a plan in place.
“You might find yourself doing those things as opposed to, you know, actively willing yourself to do those things . . . There are a lot of things in your environment propelling you in that direction, to do what you habitually do. It’s going to be tough.”
You say you’ve got a real solution
Both researchers agreed that making your goals small, specific, and achievable is key to finding success in 2015.
“It’s hard enough to change one aspect of oneself, working on a number of fronts at once can be rather problematic,” Newby-Clark said.
“For example, people often resolve to change their eating habits, and their exercise behaviour at the same time. And that’s great, but those are two tough things to work on, and perhaps resolving to work on them simultaneously is not the best of ideas. One thing at a time is good.”
According to Pychyl, making your goals actionable is also important.
“That’s one of the reasons we fail, is that our intentions are so big as to not be accountable. If I say ‘I’m going to exercise more.’ When? And if you haven’t exercised today, does it matter?”
Another way to make sure your resolutions don’t dissolve as the year goes on is to form “implementation intentions,” according to Newby-Clark.
Implementation intentions are easily described as if-then statements or if-when statements, what Newby-Clark explains as simply saying your behavioural intentions out loud.
“They’re contingencies. So things like, ‘When I wake up, I will grab my gym bag and I will get in the car and go to the gym.’ You know, it’s very concrete. ‘When it is noon, I will pull out my healthy lunch’ or if you’re a student, and you’re studying, ‘When class ends, I will take five minutes to make notes on what I just heard,’” he said.
“Implementation intentions are shown to work well across a host of behavioural domains. Everything from regulation of one’s diabetes, to study habits, to exercise habits. You name it.”
And of course, resist the urge to procrastinate. Pychyl warned against the binge working so many students depend on, and said instead, every student should accomplish at least one academic task a day.
Don’t you know it’s gonna be alright
By just getting started, Pychyl said he believes students can go from a state of reluctance to feeling motivated and encouraged by their progress.
If, for example, you resolve to read five pages of your readings in an evening, you’ll probably end up reading more because of how good it felt to get those five pages done.
“We all have a six-year-old inside of us that says ‘I don’t feel like it,’ ‘I don’t want to’ and then we don’t,” he said.
“You have to recognize that you’re not going to feel like it, so you have to lean on the fact that you’ll say ‘Well, I’m just going to get started.’”
By setting small, achievable goals, vocalizing your intentions, and working towards that resolution daily despite how much you may not feel like it, Pychyl said he believes we could see resolutions with a little more resolve.
“Just find a place to get started. Don’t concentrate on your feelings—your feelings have nothing to do with it. And then you’ll make a big change for this year.”
