You Are Going To Make It This Year!

Each New Year has something magical about it. At the first of January a brand new year lies ahead of us, it is always a bit like “starting all over”. Almost everybody has made their New Year resolutions, planning to do everything this new year better than in the previous years. This time, we promised ourselves to quit smoking or nail biting, to lose weight, to finally start the renovation of our bathroom, to visit our family more often, etc. Funny enough, the plans we make are quite similar to the plans we made the years before. This is because at New Year’s Eve we realize that we did not manage to reach all the goals we set for ourselves at the beginning of the year. Although we often are quite sincere in setting up these plans for ourselves on New Years Day, we fail to execute them successfully throughout the following year. After a couple of months into the year, it is now time to show what exactly goes wrong most of the times. First a couple of problems will be defined. Next, solutions and tips will be provided to help you succeed and to realize those New Year's resolutions.

Five reasons why we do not stick to our plans

A first problem related to New Year’s resolutions is that there are so many of them. Your friends will probably not take you seriously if you come up with only one resolution, for example, to stop spending money on ridiculously expensive shoes. People usually do not come up with only one resolution; they come up with a list. A long list of resolutions can be confusing. Some of your plans may be related to each other and may hinder each others’ execution mutually (Baumeister & Heatherton, 1996). For example, it will be quite hard to stop smoking and lose weight at the same time. When one stops smoking usually candies are used to distract oneself of the craving for a cigarette. If you simultaneously refrain yourself from eating candy, you place yourself in position that is twice as challenging.

A second problem is that your goal has to be self-concordant. You have to strive for the goal for reasons that are internal to yourself, and not for reasons that are put upon you by others (Sheldon & Kasser, 1998). If your partner wants you to quit smoking, this will be harder to execute if you do not actually want it yourself. People often do not realize that they strive for goals that are put upon them by others.

A third problem is underestimating or simply overlooking of the challenge. We often do not realize how much effort it is going to take to reach our goals. Getting out of a bad habit is quite takes considerable effort, because we are so used to performing the behavior. In the case of a bad habit, you are probably aware of the fact that you should not do it. The fact that we perform the behavior almost automatically reduces our awareness of its occurrence. We only find out how often we perform a certain behavior when we try to stop it.
A fourth problem with New Year’s resolutions is that we usually formulate them very abstractly. If our New Year’s resolution is for example to lose weight, we usually do not specify when or how we are going to do it (Gollwitzer, 1999). The abstractness of our plans makes it harder to execute it and also makes it easier to cheat. If we do not specify that we are going start losing weight today, there is no reason to stop ourselves from eating that extra cookie. When we formulate abstract plans, we end up planning all the effortful things for “tomorrow”.

A final problem with the execution of plans is that we punish ourselves too hard if we fail. A well known reaction to failure to execute a detail in your plan is thinking you can’t do it at all. This does not help you to reach your goal however. If you spoil your diet by eating one cookie, it will probably not damage you to much if you stick to the diet during the rest of the week. In all likelihood, things will go wrong if you eat a cookie and tell yourself that you’re an absolute sucker and you will never manage to lose weight in your life. This will probably make you feel so bad that you won’t continue the diet at all and as a reaction you will probably eat the entire pack of cookies. That will spoil your diet!

Winning strategies

So, how can we solve these problems and make ourselves able to actually reach the goals we set to ourselves at New Year’s Eve? First, try to reach one goal at a time. Pick one plan out of your list of New Year’s resolutions and start working to implement it. Your goal should be clear and unambiguous, so it can not be “I want to exercise sometimes”. Also, your goal should have the right level of difficulty. It should take effort to reach it, but not be unattainable.

Second, make sure that you really want to reach your goal. Ask yourself why you want to reach your goal. If you discover that you want to reach your goal because your habit is annoying to others, ask yourself whether it is worth pursuing. This might of course be the case if you have a bad habit that annoys your partner and you want to please your partner by getting out of it. However, sometimes you might set goals because you know many people that have the same goal. Planning to exercise because everybody does it will probably not motivate you enough to reach your goal.

Third, reaching your goal is going to be tough. Therefore you will need a good plan. Start with formulating your goal concretely. Research has shown that it is easier to reach your goal if you have set yourself implementation goals(Gollwitzer & Schaal, 1998). For example, if you want to exercise formulate where you are going to do that, when you want to do it, how are you going to get the money to pay for it. Most importantly, make a plan for times in which things get hairy. What are you going to do if you are invited to a party on your exercise night? Make sure you have enough arguments to persuade yourself to not give in to temptations at these moments.

Part of the plan is to set yourself subgoals. If your goal is to visit your family more often, set yourself the goal of visiting your family on Tuesday of the current week. If you manage to do so, you can increase your subgoal to visiting your family every Tuesday. Make sure that your road to goal attainment goes step-by-step. The tricky part in setting subgoals is that you might mistake your subgoal for your final goal. Reaching your subgoal may make you feel like you do not have to continue to pursue yoursuperordinate goal (Fishbach, Dhar & Zhang, 2006). However, if you managed to stop eating candy for a week, it does not mean that you do not have to exercise to keep losing weight. Keep in mind that you only have made a small step towards your final goal, you are not there yet!! 

Fourth, set yourself punishments, distractions and rewards. The next paragraphs will discuss each of these in detail. With regard to punishments, make sure you do not punish yourself too hard. Therefore, choose tasks you do not like as a punishment. For example, if you do not exercise when you actually planned to do it make yourself do the dishes for fifteen minutes (make sure you really have to do something you detest or it will not work). By applying such punishments you will be penalized when you do not comply with your plans. This might reduce the guilt you feel over not being able to execute your plan.

For distractions, provide yourself a list of things you can do when you have difficulty sticking to the plan. Distractions are especially useful when you have to quit a habit that you usually perform at home. When you quit smoking make sure that you have a book to read or some candy to eat, when you long for a cigarette. Distracting yourself during difficult times will make the attainment of your goal easier.

Finally, reward yourself! When you manage to fulfill (part of) your goal buy yourself a present, take a long shower, go to the movies or anything else you like. It is important to realize that you’re on your way to success before you try to reach the next goal. If you want to lose twenty pounds, do not expect yourself to be able to do that in a short period of time, but reward yourself for every two pounds you lose. However, do not reward yourself by allowing yourself to perform the habit you try to overcome! Be tough on yourself with regard to the attainment of your goal, but be kind to yourself in other domains. Rewarding yourself with an hour of nail-biting when you have just managed to quit for a week is not a good reward and will probably not make you feel proud of yourself. As said before, rewarding yourself for reaching a subgoal is fine but always keep your superordinate goal in mind!

By sticking to the strategies listed above you should be able to finally achieve those goals that are still on your to-do list of resolutions that you made last New Year. You might even find yourself having a hard time making up New Year’s resolutions, for all your goals of the past year might be implemented already. Good luck!

References

Baumeister, R.F. & Heatherton, T.F. (1996). Self-Regulation failure: An overview. Psychological Inquiry, 7, 1-15.

Fishbach, A., Dhar, R., & Zhang, Y. (2006). Subgoals as substitutes or complements: The role of goal accessibility. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91, 232-242.

Gollwitzer, P.M. (1999). Implementation intentions: Strong effects of simple plans. American Psychologist, 54, 493-503.

Gollwitzer, P.M., & Schaal, B. (1998). Meta cognition in action: The importance of implementation intentions. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2, 124-136.

Sheldon, K.M. & Kasser, T. (1998). Pursuing personal goals: Skills enable progress, but not all progress is beneficial. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 24,1319-1331.

General background

Geen, R.G. (1995). Human Motivation: A Social Psychological Approach. Pacific Grove, CA. Brooks/Cole.