How to Keep Your New Year's Resolution
By Sarah Rodgers
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Every year I try to complete my New Year’s resolution, and like many others, I find myself failing. It has taken me a long time to realize what many others are struggling with, and I wanted to share it with you.
A study done in the UK shows that 64% of people will quit their resolutions by the end of this month. Never even making it to February, and I was that way. For years I’ve watched as the people around me, and I would get so frustrated with what they saw as failures and then give up. It stems from multiple factors on why we are like this, and it’s going to be hard to combat this way of thinking, but we will work through it together.
It is two main factors that cause us to fail.
Issue One: We expect things to happen instantly.
Many of us expect things to happen instantly, and we want results right away. We aren’t willing to wait for them, and any result that happens instantly doesn’t last. If you rapidly lose weight, you will yo-yo because your body can’t handle it. If you rapidly start exercising, you are going to hurt yourself. If you focus on high stacks investments to make quick money, you are going to get caught in a get quick rich scam eventually.
Treat your New Year’s resolution the same as fifteen minutes of fame. Those fifteen minutes may seem great, but once they are over, you are going to rebound, and it will set yourself back farther than you were when you started.
Give yourself time. Rome wasn’t built in a day, so don’t force yourself to try to do it. You are going to damage your body and your mindset because of this. Things take time. Remember that when you are writing your New Year’s resolutions. They are for the entire year, not in the first three weeks.
Issue Two: We set unattainable goals
We’ve all been there. The ‘new year, new me’ attitude is great, but it also sets us up to fail in many aspects.
For example, I once talked with someone who wanted to lose a ton of weight, and they said that their goal was to lose almost two hundred pounds. That’s a lot of weight, and to lose that in a year is extremely hard. The person got extremely frustrated because they weren’t seeing the results they wanted by the end of the year even though they had lost about 100 pounds. They saw it as a failure because they didn’t reach the 200 pound mark yet were overlooking the fact that they were losing on average two pounds a week. That’s incredible and something they maintained the entire year and wanted to continue to pursue.
We beat ourselves up because we didn’t reach this unattainable goal that we overlook all the changes we have made. This person changed their eating habits and lifestyle, their mental and physical health improved exponentially. Those are what you should be focusing on.
Focus on the successes and don’t see yourself falling short as a failure. Set reasonable goals so that you can set yourself up for success. I’m not denying the need to challenge yourself. You have to challenge yourself, but don’t say that you will either make a certain amount of money, lose a certain amount of weight, etc., which causes you to set yourself up for failure because once the mindset is gone, you are doomed.
If you are going to take anything away from the failures of me, yourself, and the people around you when it comes to New Year’s resolution, you have to reflect on what went wrong and what caused you to quit. Set reasonable goals and remember that things take time. With the combination of these two lessons, you are going to find that your New Year’s resolution might be more successful this time around.
It is about bettering yourself. That is all that matters at the end of the day.