How to keep your new year resolutions
The new year can be such a hopefully time, we come out of Christmas and New Years with resolutions, resolve, promises that this year we will be better. That this year is our year. That things will be different. That this year you will finally achieve your weight loss goal, you will sort out all of those projects you have had on the back burner for years. You will drink less, exercise more. Be more present with family and friends. Strengthen your connections, focus on what really matters and find ways to better manage your stress.
Some of you (myself included) will write a letter from our future self a year from now, detailing how you feel having achieved the goals you set out.
We know what we want, we know how it will feel once we have it, we have a plan on how we can achieve it, but the thing that so often trips are life’s obstacles.
Postponing the walk as you feel too tired, or our boss has put in an urgent meeting, the kids are sick, the husbands sick.
Grabbing some food on the run, because you haven’t had time to have lunch.
Curling up on the couch, or even in bed at the end of the day, eating that bag of popcorn because you are exhausted and just want some comfort.
Spending quality time with your girlfriends, only to find yourself going numb and eating and drinking more than you want.
Eating anything from the pantry after a stressful meeting in order to feel better.
Starving and depriving ourselves, so any time we have anything remotely sweet or salty our dopamine surges, our brain rejoices and before we know it, the bag of chips, the block of chocolate and/or the bottle of wine have all disappeared and you are left feeling disappointed being faced with the feeling of never being fully in control.
We often then use our inability to not follow through with the plan as a way to beat up on ourselves, which only makes us seeking more comfort. This is why diets and our plans to achieve many of our goals constantly fail us, as they are only dealing with the symptoms. It’s like being dumped in the desert with the coordinates but no compass to actually help you follow the coordinates. They tell you what to do, but don’t tell you how to do it. How to do what you say you will do, when you say you will do it.
It sounds so simple, create a plan and follow it. But because of how our human brain is wired it is actually one of the hardest things to do. Have you ever noticed that you plan your day and then when it comes to doing something on your plan that your brain will invariable put up a little resistance? If this sounds familiar then know that you are not alone. You brain likes to do what is familiar and it likes to be efficient. So anytime you are trying to do something different, your brain will freak out, because it is unknown and therefore makes it less efficient, as it will take more energy.
If we want to change our results, achieve our goals, we need to learn the skill of taking action, even when our brain doesn’t want to. While this may feel uncomfortable in the beginning, the great thing about the brain is that it will want to become efficient. So after a while of taking the new action, it will become more familiar to the brain and therefore it will actually want to keep taking that action, as that is what is now familiar.
While you go through this process of changing the way you have previously done things, one thing you can do to support your brain through this process is reduce the uncertainty.
One way I like to do this is when I am setting out my goal, I make a list of all of the possible obstacles that may get in my way and then for each of these obstacles I think of an action I can take to overcome the obstacle.
For example:
Obstacle: Dinner with girlfriends at end of a work day, risk of eating burger and fries even though I know that I will feel terrible afterwards.
Action: I will look up the menu beforehand, decide what I am going to eat and then spend the day looking forward to eating that. That way when I arrive, usually rushed and frazzled I am not just going to order the burger and fries. Instead I have made the decision for myself ahead of time (before the day of back to back meetings and school pick ups happened) and because I have spent the day looking forward to what I was going to order, the temptation to just order burger and fries is not as strong as I have created desire for my decision.
This is critical and something to practise, creating desire for decisions that serve you. As when you are choosing between the two options, desire is more often decider and so it is important to be deliberate about what you desire. To build on desire, I also add the feeling I will get following the meal, the feeling of being proud that I honoured a commitment to myself, rather than going home disappointed and bloated from eating the burger and fries.
