About New Year's resolutions and failure
The clock strikes 0, the year changes. You look motivated and full of anticipation into the new year, because this year everything will be different! Whether it's more exercise, quitting smoking, losing weight, no more sweets - now seems to be the time to get rid of old, disruptive behaviors. Now everything will be different! Or not? Almost everyone knows the game: At the start of the new year, you are highly motivated to turn your life around and make everything better. From today you are a new person and of course you achieve your completely realistic annual resolutions. You start the year full of motivation and hope that it will be different this time. But after just one or two weeks you usually notice: It's not that easy after all. At the end of January, you usually caught yourself puffing on a cigarette again, caught yourself accidentally eating chocolate when you were stressed, caught yourself again not wanting to go to the gym, which you are now planning to do registered extra in January. Once the first completely realistic resolution is made, the rest is like dominoes and then suddenly it's already November 2022. And all the resolutions and illusions start all over again. New Year's resolutions seem doomed to fail. But New Year's resolutions can really be achieved if you do them right.
Formulate New Year's resolutions correctly
Most of the time, even when formulating the new resolutions, you go completely over the top. Whether it's quitting smoking, finally losing weight, less stress or more sport. The wording is mostly spongy or unfortunately completely unrealistic. To lose weight, you do without everything, you stop smoking with a cold turkey, for more sport you try to stick to a training plan with six training units a week. Due to the completely exaggerated goals, the motivation lasts for just two weeks and you quickly find yourself in old habits. Take a closer look at your resolutions: most are geared toward avoiding certain behaviors rather than toward specific goals. And breaking out of old patterns and habits is really, really difficult, especially if you're only going about it half-heartedly. It is better to formulate your resolutions as a goal and break it down into sub-goals. Plan your resolution so that it fits your lifestyle and try to approach this goal in small steps (sub-goals).
Motivation as the driving force behind New Year's resolutions
Sure, motivation is important. But it is not decisive for perseverance, but discipline and habit. To get used to something, you just have to repeat it as many times as possible, and that's what you need the discipline for. Don't think of the path to your goal as a straight line, but rather as a wave to ride. And there will be ups and downs there too, and also days that won't go as planned.
Dealing with the failure of New Year's resolutions
One or two days don't go as planned and you would like to throw everything over the top? That's exactly what you shouldn't do now. Above all, it is important how you deal with failure and obstacles. We at HÄNG have - viewed objectively - already failed one or the other time. You read how we dealt with it here. You haven't failed just because old behaviors creep back in. Setbacks are just as much a part of changing behavior as successes! So take a deep breath and snuggle up comfortably in yours HANG, bad days are part of it.
