Have you broken your New Year’s resolution yet?
According to Tara Parker-Pope’s recent New York Times article “Will Your Resolutions Last Until February?” as well as Kristi Hedges’ Forbes piece “Why Your New Year’s Resolution Will Fail By February,” many won’t even reach the one month mark with their New Year’s goals. The time between Dec. 31 and Jan. 1 creates an unusually optimistic atmosphere for individuals who aspire to change their lives. Something about the promise of 12 unsullied months fills many of us with hope that we will find ourselves in better positions next year. With the start of a new semester, I know that I am feeling enthusiastic about my abilities to work harder and procrastinate less.
However, I cannot help but worry about the high failure rate of the average new year goal. After all, my New Year’s resolution for the past six years has been to lose weight by exercising more. This should be easy. The formula for losing weight is not particularly complex, it is just a matter of expending more energy than you take in. Regardless of theoretical ease, I just can’t seem to get the ratio of eat and move to work in my favor.
My other resolution has always been to bring up my cumulative GPA to above a 3.0, which is a goal I’ve actually managed to reach by wasting less time and studying more – again, a pretty common-sense way to reach a reasonable goal. But if this information is common knowledge, why are so many of my peers having trouble actually achieving their academic goals? An immediate answer could be laziness, but I believe this is too easy of a scapegoat and distracts from the true causes.
It is very easy to make broad proclamations in the face of the new year. Dr. Arya Sharma of the Canadian Obesity Network states that making general and vague statements like these can be the beginning of a futile attempt to make lasting changes in your life. Psychology professor Peter Herman and his colleagues cite the “false hope syndrome,” which claims that people who set impossible goals “are out of alignment with their internal view of themselves” and get in their own way. In response, I believe the solution to increasing success is to customize my resolutions and cut them down into a series of manageable bits. My goal to lose weight and go the gym more becomes lose one pound each week and exercise five days out of the seven.
But creating a list of attainable, smaller goals needs to be taken one step further in order to maximize success. For example, getting to the gym in the morning is the hardest obstacle coming between me making it to the gym regularly. In order to combat excuses, I will go to sleep earlier, schedule my classes later and already have a gym bag packed the night before. As for academics, I will go to my professors’ office hours before major assignments are due, making appointments beforehand, in order to pressure myself to get to work earlier. Instead of churning out 10 pages in the middle of the night, I can divide up sections to work on earlier in the process. Yes, this is more work, but the combination of these efforts will form a set of security measures against procrastination.
Will this new plan really work? I do not have a 100 percent guarantee but I can provide personal experience. In the fall of 2011, I lost 15 pounds and ended up regularly going to the gym each week. Now, as someone who has been telling herself that she will lose weight since high school this is a significant accomplishment. I am not a particularly motivated or intelligent person. I am no stranger to handing in an assignment that was just thrown together as the sun rose or putting off homework in favor of watching mind-numbing television. But with the desire of wanting more sleep and being frustrated at recycled resolutions, I could not accept the common excuse that I was lazy.
Procrastination is a convenient excuse, as it stops the brain from questioning or analyzing too deeply the underlying issues in one’s life. For me, I found that my procrastination stemmed from a fear of failure. By putting off work until the last possible moment, I found it harder to become invested in the outcome. I could always blame the mediocre results with the fact that I had little time to actually do better.
In the past, my goals were vague and impossible sounding so they inspired little to no planning. I could hold on to the false hope that one day I would change but until then I would keep up this façade of a positive attitude to make myself feel better. But then I realized there was something larger at work.
Society and our education system punish those who fail and dole out severe consequences. The fear of being laughed at or ridiculed for trying is such a huge risk that sometimes people think it is better to avoid the whole situation all together. Inevitably, everyone fails. Everyone makes mistakes. That does not justify breaking one’s resolution and just waiting around for next year to try again.
Failure is another opportunity to start again but with the advantage of newly gained insight. Regardless of your resolutions or their current status, remember that it takes 21 days to form a new habit, not 365.
Cassie Jeon is a Collegian columnist. She can be reached at [email protected].
