Do you have difficulty achieving your New Year Resolutions? Well, you are certainly not the only one – 92% of people are unsuccessful in achieving their resolution. Quite disappointing, isn’t it? Before you decided to skip making New Year Resolutions altogether, you’ll need to reflect on why your past years’ resolutions fail and stop making the same mistakes will just make a difference for year 2015.
1. You forget
It’s not uncommon to completely forget about your New Year Resolutions after a few weeks or months have gone by. According to research conducted at the University of Scranton, only 46% managed to maintain their resolutions past 6 months. This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, since you might be too focused on work, family or other obligations to really stay focused on your major goal. That’s why it’s so important to remind ourselves throughout the year. Even better than writing it down on paper, set a repeated reminder in Google calendar or your smartphone’s calendar to send notifications on start of every Sunday (or your off day if you are working on weekends). If you find it too annoying, maybe consider buying this phone case as an alternative.
2. You can’t keep your mouth shut
You tell your New Year Resolutions with your friends, or you even share on Facebook or Twitter because sharing this way can help you to make a public commitment to the goals you’ve set. Well, bad news: you should have kept your mouth shut, because that good feeling now will make you less likely to do it. There is some research to back this up. Peter Gollwitzer of New York University specializes in goal-setting. In his article (PDF) about announcing intentions he discovers (in Study 3) that people who have announced their goals give up on them quicker than people who haven’t. By telling someone your goal makes it less likely to happen because you tricked your mind in thinking that it’s already done. And then, because you felt that satisfaction, you’re less motivated to do the actual hard work necessary. So the next time you’re tempted to tell someone your goal, what will you say?
3. You are overambitious
In his book How We Decide, Jonah Lehrer writes about a study done by Stanford University. It found when people tried to memorize more information, their willpower suffered. The more New Year Resolutions you made, the less likely you are to achieve them. It’s tempting to try everything on this list, but for best results, focus on your top three resolutions. You can always do more later, or add a new resolution when you achieve one on your short list. Just a trivial, here’s top 3 new resolutions for year 2015 by Twitter. Looks familiar?
- Work Out
- Be happy
- Lose weight
