As the end of the year approaches, do yourself a favor for the new year: don’t set a New Year’s resolution. Though a few people successfully keep their resolutions, 25 percent of people who set a resolution give up on it in the first week.
By making a New Year’s resolution, you set yourself up for failure from January 1. You can use better strategies to drop a few pounds than making a late-night promise to yourself; simply avoid these common pitfalls:
Avoid these common pitfalls
Your New Year’s resolution is too big.
Because you have a year to achieve a New Year’s resolution, you may set a big goal, like dropping 50 pounds, reading 100 novels or paying off thousands of dollars of debt. However, you can’t achieve these goals quickly, which hurts your motivation. You are more likely to achieve smaller goals, such as losing five pounds. By repeating these small goals, you may end up losing 50 pounds anyway.
You can’t stay motivated for a year.
When you have a whole year to achieve a goal, you can easily procrastinate on getting started, making it more likely that you’ll never start at all. It is also hard to stay focused on the same goal for so long. Short-term goals offer greater rates of success because you feel good every time you meet one, spurring you on to achieve the next goal. By setting daily or weekly goals, you may be able to make the small changes you need to see big results.
You told someone about your resolution.
New Year’s resolutions are often a social activity, something that you share with others both before and after New Year’s eve. However, studies suggest that telling other people your goals can actually make you less likely to achieve them. Making a goal for yourself at other times in the year, when you don’t feel you need to share it with anyone else, offers better chances of success.
You made a resolution because your friends did.
Since resolutions are a social activity, many people make them simply because everyone else at the party is making one. If you are going to make a lifestyle change, you need to want to do it for your own individual reasons, not just because it is a tradition to make a goal every year.
You think everyone breaks their resolutions.
Every year, you’ll hear funny stories of people failing to keep their resolutions in spectacular ways: promising to lose 20 pounds but gaining 10 instead, promising to go skydiving but freezing up once in the plane. Failure to meet resolutions is so common that there is no societal pressure to actually achieve your goal at all. If you have made your resolution out of peer pressure, it is easy to break it once that pressure is gone.
While you can set smarter goals at other times in the year, you may want to give up on goals and resolutions altogether. Instead, you can achieve changes in your life by setting up systems that support the change. For instance, instead of focusing on the goal of losing 20 pounds, set up a regular exercise schedule. If you only pay attention to the schedule, you could achieve the goal without even thinking about it. After all, it is the exercise that is more important to improving your health; not the number on the scale.
Whether you stick with goals or set up a system, one thing is clear: to make lasting changes in the new year, ditch your New Year’s resolutions.