I love making resolutions. I’ve found them to be a great way to get motivated, especially after I’ve failed to deliver on some other promise I made to myself. For example, I’d promise myself I’d stop eating junk food. I’d do pretty well for a couple of weeks, and then a familiar story happens (I’m sure something similar happened to you if you’ve made some resolutions): I have to stay late at work, or I end up celebrating something with my friends, and I end up eating a bunch of junk food. Worse (because junk food is just so good and because I’ve already failed), I continue eating junk food.

I found the best way to get out of this hole to be saying to myself, “OK, tomorrow, I am restarting my life. I’ll eat healthy food, and also go running every other day.” I stop thinking about what had happened and start looking into the future — hell yeah, I’ll be able to stick to my new resolution! I’ll be strong–it can only get better from now.

It is, at the end of the day, just a game I play with myself–but there again, if I didn’t need to play games with myself, I wouldn’t be failing on my resolutions. There are some caveats that I’ve realized over time.

• Don’t wait for an arbitrary time to start a resolution. No point waiting for Monday morning (or, worse, the beginning of a new month!) — tomorrow is as good a day as any. In fact, why not start right now? I like to write the time at which I made the resolution on a white board in my room to remind me of how much time has passed without me breaking a promise.
• Be careful not to make the ease with which you make resolutions become an excuse for breaking promises. I’ve noticed that I’ve made my resolutions more frequent through waiting much less, not through breaking my promises faster.
• Don’t be too ambitious–small promises work best, especially if you extend them over time. If you promise yourself something unachievable, you’re likely to break it sooner (and, what’s worse, you’re also likely to dip deeper–for example, break all the promises you’ve made so far at once)
• What you do between breaking a promise and making a new one matters–I used to stuff myself silly with junk food before making a resolution not to eat it “because it’s the last time in a long time I’ll be having it”. As a result, I ended up eating more junk food over time than before making these resolutions. This is also another reason why you may want to decrease the amount of time between breaking a promise and making another one.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 1st, 2009 at 01:18 and is filed under lifehacks, things everyone should do. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.