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By Caroline Mora
New Year’s resolutions. Everyone makes them, but how many people stick to them? The New Year is symbolic of a new life for many people. They see it as a big motivation or cause for change, but only about 8% of people who make resolutions can achieve their goals. Why?
Unfortunately, waking up one day and deciding to change is never effective. Especially if you’re trying to stop a bad habit or a guilty pleasure, abrupt lifestyle changes, specifically ones that require you to restructure your entire life in 24 hours essentially, don’t last.
For example, addicts don’t just decide to stop substance abuse, people who love to sleep in don’t just decide to wake up early and pathological liars don’t just decide to “pick up honesty.” Nothing about lifestyle changes is casual; these are huge adjustments that need to be gradually done for them to work.
Breaking a habit
Habits are created by the repeated release of dopamine in your brain when you do an activity that you enjoy. This isn’t always necessarily a good or bad activity, anything that makes you feel good releases dopamine. This can get you stuck in a habit loop—your brain wants to do something, you do it and you get chemically rewarded for that behavior. This reward keeps you coming back for more.
When trying to break a habit, you’re depriving yourself of those dopamine hits and physically weakening neural pathways in your brain. One could imagine how difficult that would be, which is why habits are hard to break. I’ve never completed a New Year’s resolution, but with the following techniques, I hope to make this year more successful than the last.
Be specific
Being specific in your New Year’s resolutions is super important. If you only have a vague sense of what you are working towards, then it is easier to bend the rules for yourself. This also allows you to track your progress numerically, if your goal can be measured that way. Make sure you make a very detailed plan to follow to both celebrate your small victories and also accept your failures.
Progress ≠ linear
The biggest part of breaking habits and self-improvement is acknowledging that progress isn’t always linear, and failure is inevitable. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither were those neural pathways. Being comfortable with being uncomfortable is the only way we can learn and grow as humans. Understanding that failing is a learning opportunity and giving you an example of how to improve your experience next time.
Make small goals
Making short-term goals is the key to your success with your resolutions. One big goal can be lofty, and even if you have a ton of motivation on January 1, will you still feel the same by January 21? Or even later in the year.
If you mess up even once on the road to completing your ambitious goals, you can become very discouraged. By making small goals, you can celebrate your victories and feel that you’re impacting your life more. Many little things can add up to big things.