Dropping the ball on

New Year’s resolutions

 

» Why we make them and why they’re designed to fail

Yur at a party. The whole room has erupted
in a festive countdown, with everyone
chanting in unison. Maybe your midnight kiss is
on standby next to you or maybe the only mouth
you plan on kissing is on your next beer bottle.
As the final seconds of the past year dwindle
away, you find yourself looking back on the
previous 365 days, inevitably zeroing in on where
you went right or wrong. Will the next year be
any different? Might this finally be your year
when you make nothing but good decisions and
finally nix those self-destructive habits?

The defeatist (though realistic) answer is
probably not. Predictably—and yet, to some,
surprisingly—the chances of you keeping that
New Year’s resolution hovers around the eight
per cent mark. Out of every hundred people who
wish they could make more friends, get a raise,
and fit into smaller clothes, only eight of them
are likely to succeed. In spite of this depressing
wasteland of failure, making a resolution is
almost expected of people. So where did these
annual goals come from? How did they become
a fixture in our goal-orientated mentality? And
why is it that despite all the good intentions
and resources available, most resolutions go
unresolved?

If you think New Year’s resolutions are only
for characters in cheesy romantic comedies, you
might want to reconsider. Only 38 per cent of
the population say they “absolutely never” make
resolutions, meaning 62 per cent of them do at
least occasionally. However, the daunting failure
rate has likely caused people to begin to wane on
making said resolutions, as a 2013 poll from CBS
showed a 10 per cent drop in people who made
resolutions from two years prior.

As for where the act of making a New
Year’s resolution comes from, the tradition
can be traced all the way back to Babylonian
times. Every March, people would set goals
for themselves with the intention of doing
good for the overall community. However, the
tradition was shifted to January by the Romans
and it became more similar to the self-focussed
resolutions of modern day. Obviously there is no
data available for how well previous generations
fared in their New Year’s goals, but I’m going to
make the assumption that for as long as people
have been making resolutions, people have been
putting in a mediocre effort and abandoning
them a few weeks later.

So why is it that after all these years, people
still find themselves mentally mapping out their
personal improvements for the coming year? You
could easily disregard it as a novelty tradition,

but there’s more to New Year’s resolutions than
just empty promises. According to Dr. John
Duffy, a clinical psychologist and life coach,
“Most of us have a natural bent toward self-
improvement.” An added bonus is that, by
setting a specific starting point (such as January
1), it “gives us time and a goal date to prepare for
the change, to fire up for the shifts we plan to
make.” It’s a natural thing for humans to want to
improve themselves and a shifting calendar year
provides the perfect opportunity.

Another reason why people make New
Year’s resolutions is, much like the habits they’re
trying to break, they're simply used to making
them. Forty-five per cent of people “usually”
make resolutions, and because humans can be
so habitual, a person might not even stop to
consider why they’re making resolutions in the
first place.

So now that we know where New Year's
resolutions come from and why people make
them, it’s time to answer the burning question:
are they effective?

The unfortunate reality here is that bvy
the time of this article’s publishing—a bit over
a week into 2014—a significant percentage of
resolution makers will have already broken their
own self-made goals. Only 75 per cent of people
make it past the first week, which plummets to
64 per cent after the first month. At the halfway
point in the year, only 46 per cent of people have
stuck with their resolutions. If you're looking
for simple pass/fail percentages, only eight per
cent say they successfully keep their resolutions
while 49 per cent have “infrequent success.” Even
if you're not a math person, it’s easy to see the
numbers aren't in your favour.

While it’s disappointing to hear, there’s
an actual scientific reason why we're unable
to stick with our resolutions. The area of our
brain that’s responsible for our willpower, the
prefrontal cortex, is also in charge of things
like short-term memory and staying focussed.
Because an enormous amount of willpower is
needed to maintain your resolutions, it ends up
overloading your prefrontal cortex. This is why
longevity becomes a problem if your resolution
is long-term orientated.

With all of the statistics and biology
working against you, it might be easy to simply
forgo making New Year's resolutions from
now on. I personally wouldn't go so far as to
say resolutions are pointless (okay, they
largely are) but the intentions behind
them are well-meaning, and that’s
a good starting point. Instead of

 

setting goals for the new year, you need to focus
on building habits. They’re harder than goals
because they take more time to develop, but they
last longer. Ask anyone who's a regular smoker;
once you start a habit, it’s hard to stop.

Now, I know what you're thinking.
“Developing healthy habits sounds like a lot
of work. Isn't there a faster, easier way to make
my resolutions come true?” Through hours of
research and personal experience, I’ve come
to believe that since resolutions are hard to
accomplish, you should simply make resolutions
that are the exact opposite of what you want to
have happen. For example, let’s say someone tells
me that their resolution is to be more involved
with the Other Press. After my initial “Awww!”
moment, I would likely tell them to tweak the
resolution slightly: “Your resolution should be
to distance yourself as far as possible from the
newspaper and avoid contributing. That way,
through the power of reverse psychology, your
resolution will fail and you will undoubtedly
become a prominent figure in the Other Press
community.”

So there you have it. You know where New
Year’s resolutions came from, how commonly
they fail, why you fail, and my very own signature
Quick Fix to New Year's Resolutions™. What it
all comes down to, though, is how you want to
approach the next year. Yes, 2014 could be the
best year of your life where all of your wishes
come true. Or it could be just as shitty as
the last year. It’s entirely in your own
hands to make it happen.

Oh, and in case you're
wondering: I did indeed make
a New Year’s resolution for
myself. My goal is to not
go parasailing fora
whole year. I’ve never
parasailed in my life.

Wish me luck!

~