As Jay wrote a few years ago: I know, everyone waits till New Years to make the big push. But you’re not everyone. You’re different. Or at least, you want to be. Well, screw that….. START NOW. START TODAY!!!!!...
As Jay wrote a few years ago:
I know, everyone waits till New Years to make the big push. But you’re not everyone. You’re different. Or at least, you want to be.
Well, screw that….. START NOW.
START TODAY!!!!!
So what, it’s not the “New Years”. Or the 1st of the month. Hell. it ain’t even a Monday….
But who cares. Today is a good day to change your life.
And there’s good reason not to wait until the First . . . New Year’s Resolutions often fail, and for a variety of reasons. It’s not that you shouldn’t want to make changes, but you need to be mindful of the goals you set, and that there is nothing magically about starting a resolution on the first of the year.
From a 2010 Psychology Today article:
According to researcher John Norcross and his colleagues, who published their findings in the Journal of Clinical Psychology, approximately 50% of the population makes resolutions each New Year. Among the top resolutions are weight loss, exercise, stopping smoking, better money management and debt reduction.
Timothy Pychyl, a professor of psychology at Carleton University in Canada, says that resolutions are a form of “cultural procrastination,” an effort to reinvent oneself. People make resolutions as a way of motivating themselves, he says. Pychyl argues that people aren’t ready to change their habits, particularly bad habits, and that accounts for the high failure rate. Another reason, says Dr. Avya Sharma of the Canadian Obesity Network, is that people set unrealistic goals and expectations in their resolutions.
Radiolab also did an interesting piece on will-power, which has some implications for those wanting to make changes in the New Year:
According to British psychologist Richard Wiseman, 88 percent of all resolutions end in failure. Those are his findings from a 2007 University of Hertfordshire study of more than 3,000 people.
How come so many attempts at willpower lose both their will and their power?
In our Radiolab excerpt on Morning Edition, with my co-host, Jad Abumrad, we propose an answer …