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The problem with New Year’s resolutions — and an alternative for 2024.
As we head towards the end of the year, how many of you are thinking about resolutions for the new year?
Perhaps the better questions are: how many of you had resolutions this year? How did that go for you?
Don’t feel bad — research suggests that 80% of New Year’s resolutions fail with nearly a quarter of them falling by the wayside after the first week and 43% broken by the end of January.
That’s because behaviour change is really hard and trying to literally make it happen overnight is even harder. Just ask James Clear:
Success is the product of daily habits — not once-in-a-lifetime transformations (Atomic Habits)
What makes it even harder is that we tend to make our resolutions absolute:
- I want to lose 30lb by the end of June
- I want to be able to run for an hour non-stop by the end of the year.
What happens if we lose 28lb? Or can only run for 50 minutes? Technically, we’ve failed.
So given that setting a New Year’s resolutions is a pretty rubbish way of improving ourselves, let me suggest an alternative solution: an annual theme.
