Keeping your New Year's resolutions is not about how much willpower you have. New research suggests the most self-controlled people don't rely on willpower, but prevent irresistible desires from emerging by creating environments where temptations simply don’t arise. By controlling our environment, rather than by attempting to control ourselves, we can keep our actions in line with our goals – and maybe even stick to our resolutions this year.
Each year, millions of people make New Year’s resolutions, with goals like exercising more, saving more money, losing weight, improving one’s diet, and spending less time on social media among the most popular in recent years. However, it seems that most people fail to keep their resolutions for very long, with some studies suggesting that by six months about 60% of individuals fail to maintain their commitments and that about 80% have failed after two years.
Making significant changes to patterns in your daily life is hard, and there are many reasons that people fail to achieve what they resolve to do. For example, you may set an unrealistic or overly general goal or set a realistic goal but fail to outline intermediate steps to achieve it. Yet, even if you avoid these problems, there will be times when you are faced with potential temptations to break your resolution: to sleep in instead of going to the gym, to buy that expensive latte instead of saving a bit of money, to eat a second piece of cheesecake instead of sticking to your diet. To keep a resolution for any significant amount of time, you need self-control.
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