Why You Won’t Stick To Your New Year’s Resolutions
New Year’s resolutions have been around for thousands of years. The ancient Babylonians were the first to make new year promises back in 1894 BC.
Fast forward and here we are again. Another year has passed. You have made it out of NYE weekend.
It’s time for you to start fresh and make your resolutions for 2018.
Celebrity resolutions this year include soon to be Princess Meghan Markle pledging “to stop biting my nails, stop swearing and re-learn French”.
Some of us will pursue our New Year’s resolutions with extra vigour in the beginning. Some of us will stick to it until the end of the year.
Most of us will, unfortunately, break our resolutions days later. It’s just facts.
Sky News reported that in 2017 only 1 in 5 people failed to keep all their resolutions in just the first week. If you are one of these people, you have come to the right place.
We can’t tell you what resolutions you should be making – as you will probably break them.
What we can do is give you a look at why most people break their resolutions.
Can you relate to any of these ?
You Haven’t Really Defined Your Goals
Sounds easy enough, but making detailed resolutions is quite important.
Most of us are quite vague with our resolutions. If you are really serious about doing this, instead of saying ‘I will go to the gym more often’, say “I will go to the gym every Tuesday and Friday”.
Having a clear vision of your goals will help you achieve them.
If you really want to push yourself, make these goals a public declaration.
This will make you less likely to abandon that goal. I mean who wants to disappoint their followers, definitely not me.
Loss Aversion
Evidence shows that we humans are driven by ‘loss aversion’.
Loss aversion is a fancy way of saying that we are more motivated to recover losses than we are to win gains. So what does this mean for you?
Stop framing your resolutions around gaining something new e.g. “my new summer bod”.
It may be more effective to base your resolutions on recovering something that you lost. Maybe an old hobby? Picking up your old running shoes?
You Keep Making Exceptions
Sure enough there are certain situations which count as exceptions.
You won’t really go to the gym if your house is on fire. The only thing about exceptions is that we tend to exploit them. By expanding the circumstances to include a range of exceptions.
“It’s too cold to wake up early and go outside”, “I have soo much work to catch up on”. Sound familiar?
Be very careful to make sure that not everything becomes an exception. We know its hard, but you have to push yourself. This is what makes you different to anyone else that blows every opportunity to make real change.
Treating A Marathon Like A Sprint
Have a lot of bad habits you are thinking of cutting this year? The last thing you want to do is restructure your entire life overnight.
The ‘I want it all, and I want it now mentality’ is a sure recipe for disaster.
Slow and steady habit changes may not be that sexy, but they work. Quit the crash diets, over excessive exercise plans and take it slow. Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Small changes are far less intimidating and much more likely to stick.
