Why New Year’s resolutions fail

Did you set your resolutions for 2021 but they have already failed? If so, don’t despair. Whether or not they did, I am going to let you in on a little secret (well, this is not actually a secret, rather something well documented in research, but read on!).

Did you know that a month into a new year only 64 percent of resolutions continue to be pursued? Whilst I cannot pretend to know the reasons why from an individual’s perspective, I looked into the psychology of timing in successful outcomes and this is what I found.

When we want to establish a fresh start, we tend to use two types of temporal landmarks – social and personal. A social landmark is one that everyone shares e.g. a New Year, Mondays, the beginning of the month etc. A personal landmark is one unique to the individual e.g. one’s birthday, one’s anniversary etc. These landmarks serve two purposes: firstly, they allow us to turn the page, start afresh by relegating old habits or even our ‘old selves’ to the past. Secondly, they allow us to take a look at the ‘big picture’ of our life and move temporarily away from the day-to-day details. How many times have you heard of people going through a middle-life crisis of some sort? Well, that is sometimes related to them taking a ‘big picture’ look at their life (often on or around the time of a big birthday) and deciding that perhaps they are not where they would like to be…

Anyhow, temporal landmarks are useful because they allow us to make decisions rooted in careful deliberation and conscious awareness and yes, you guessed it, personal landmarks are often more powerful than social ones.

There is also something called ‘the fresh start effect’ which has implications that are also personal and social, for examples they can offer the opportunity to start again and create turning points in our lives.

So if you consider the above, it becomes apparent that these temporal landmarks can be powerful and work in our favour if we understand the unconscious effect they can have on our minds. Then, one has to wonder: why instead of setting resolutions for 1st January and failing to keep them up, don’t we get smarter and use the same psychological mechanism to set resolutions with awareness and intention for a time that suits us better?

Genius, right? 🙂

Well, I did have a secret after all and that is that I have never set a New Year’s resolution in my life (albeit unaware of the reasons why).

Photo by Emma Matthews Digital Content Production on Unsplash