Cracking The New Year's Resolution Code
As we enter this new decade, many people are renewing their commitment to fitness and nutrition goals as part of a New Year’s resolution. After a period of reflection usually brought on during the holiday season, many take stock of their goals and renew their commitment to their overall health and well-being. The New Year’s resolution encourages millions of people to experiment with their diets and to adopt a new exercise routine. Gyms gear up for an influx of customers and words like “ketogenic”, “paleo”, and “gluten-free” become a dietary trend for dieters looking for the magic bullet to a weight loss or health formula. As the months begin to pass, however, we find that many peoples’ resolutions for cleaning up their diets and implementing that new exercise routine have fallen by the wayside. One quick Google search tells us that more people fail than succeed at these resolutions, leaving us to wonder how someone can make their resolutions stick?
New Year's resolutions often center around establishing a new habit or dropping a perceived bad habit. This change can be anything from a new exercise regimen to a commitment to ditch a substance such as sugar. TIME magazine notes that in 2012 the most common New Year's resolution was losing weight and getting fit, and the second was stopping smoking. These health-oriented resolutions seem to be particularly popular each year. The days after the start of the New Year leave people freshly charged with motivation, but lacking the understanding to transform this motivation into a positive new habit or stopping a negative one.
According to the American Psychological Association, the key to a resolution’s sustainability may be in starting small. In an article entitled “Making Your New Year’s Resolution stick”, the APA advises that small and gradual steps towards change are more effective than large and total changes all at once. They also write that “by making your resolutions realistic, there is a greater chance that you will keep them throughout the year, incorporating healthy behavior into your everyday life”. It appears that setting small, incremental, and feasible goals is one facet of resolution success backed by science.
Another common aspect among resolutioners is a strong sense of “where” they want to end, but no sense of “why” they want to go there. In setting a goal, many fail to stop and consider their reasons for \ making the change in the first place. As Dr. Marcelo Campos notes in his article “Answer these 5 questions to make your New Year’s resolution stick”, knowing your “why” is the first step to success in maintaining a resolution. This will allow you to internalize a deeper sense of motivation when temptations inevitably arise to break your new habit or resume old habits . This can be especially important when considering a fitness goal such as working out more can leave you fatigued and sore as your body adapts to the new lifestyle. Knowing and having a strong “why” can prevent that newly purchased gym membership from going to waste.
Perhaps the most important aspect of sticking to a resolution is the individual's ability to establish and maintain a habit. As the fields of psychology and neurology continually improve our understanding of habit formation, many people have become keenly interested in this topic and its implications in our everyday lives. Our study of the brain has demonstrated that each time you participate in a habit, you strengthen the cues and brain circuits associated with that particular habit. As Time Magazine noted, an effective way to rewire your brain is to replace a bad habit with a healthier habit. For example, an individual who struggles with watching too much television could replace their nightly session of TV with a trip to the gym. Replacing this old habit with a new habit helps you to focus less on the old habit by occupying your brain with newer and healthier habits.
Another effective technique that can assist the resolutioner is, as Time Magazine also notes, to recognize your habit cues. Habits can be associated with cues such as locations or times, which generate a desire to implement a specific habit. For example, a person who wants to cut out sugar should avoid passing by their favorite ice cream shop on the nightly walk. Recognizing when or where a habit tends to take place can help in eliminating it.
As we usher in this new decade, many people will attempt to crack the code of the New Year’s resolution. As motivation reach sky-high levels and begin a slow descent as the year continues, dieters may become discouraged or even stop their attempt to change altogether. As each year passes, however, we learn more about the human brain and our ability to form habits and, in turn, enable more people to become successful in their resolutions. Although it is definitely a challenge to be successful in a New Year’s resolution, implementation of the aforementioned strategies listed in this article as well as additional research can make a successful resolution seem less like a daunting code of willpower to crack but rather a rewarding journey.
Works Cited
https://www.ncsf.org/blog/154-top-reasons-why-people-fail-in-their-exercise-programs
https://www.apa.org/helpcenter/resolution
https://time.com/5373528/break-bad-habit-science/
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,2040218,00.html
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/answer-these-5-questions-to-help-make-your-new-years-resolutions-stick-2017122012940
