Richard Hogan: How failing at new year's resolutions is the key to lasting change

woman thinking in front of new year resolutions written blackboard

So, it is January, and all that gusto you had for a new you has started to wane.

You have noticed that you have started to allow some of those old habits to creep back into your routine. A biscuit here, a walk avoided there, taking on things you promised yourself you wouldn’t, and all of a sudden you are back doing exactly what you were doing before you launched out on a new year’s resolution.

It can be demoralising, watching all your good intentions transmute back into old behaviours. Samuel Johnson said: “The chains of habit are too weak to notice until they are too strong to be broken”.

I think this is what happens to so many people at this time of year.

January can be a cruel month, we have just had some lovely moments with our family, but now the tree is down, the glittering lights are gone, and reality — with all her cruel clarity — is reflecting what didn’t work last year and what we need to do differently in the year ahead.

And so, by about six days in, we can feel a little hopeless as we watch ourselves slip back into the old habits that we know are not good for us.

That is why new year’s resolutions can often leave us feeling hopeless and powerless to change. It really doesn’t have to be like this.

We can make the changes we know we need to make. But first of all, we need to think about all the failed solutions we have attempted before.

Think about it like this — let’s just say you had a leak in the roof, and you attempted to fix it yourself by plastering over the crack, but within a week it was leaking again. Would you keep going back up there, plastering over it, time and time again? Repeatedly utilising a failed solution? I think we all know the answer to that question.

Einstein defined this approach as insanity. But this is exactly what people do at this time of year. They think about their life and what they want to do differently, they do that for a little while, and slowly their old habits start to leak back into their lives.

Before they know it, the old solution has once again failed.

More significantly though, the next time they think about changing, they will use the same old failed solution and of course, the outcome will be remarkably similar. You can bet that old roof on it.

So, this week, think about the change you want to bring into your life. Write it down. Let’s just say you want to be on your phone less, exercise more, and stop being a people-pleaser.

There is nothing more exciting than attempting to bring a positive change into your life. Be excited about the journey you are going on — change is going to happen. So now that you have journaled those three significant changes you want in your life, now write down your most used failed solution.

For example, “I turn the phone upside down while watching TV”, or “I leave it in the kitchen, but eventually, I stop doing that, and I’m on it again more than I like”.

Now you have failed solutions to avoid — this is an important starting point. So you know that turning the phone upside down or leaving it in the kitchen isn’t going to bring the change you desire. You will have to think of a different solution.

Perhaps turning it off at 8 pm and asking your partner to put it somewhere charging will be more successful. Maybe this solution might work. At least it’s not the same as the old, failed ones.

Let’s say you want to stop pleasing everyone but yourself. A very worthy pursuit. But when you analyse it, you realise that your attempted solution of failed excuses when your father, mother, or friends ask you to do something you don’t have time to do doesn’t work whatsoever.

Think of the brain as this silently blind, incredibly complicated machine. It has so much to process at any given moment. It is funnelling all the information it receives to check for threat. Its workload is far too great. So it relies on what it knows and what is familiar.

That is why you constantly fall back on previously attempted solutions to fix a problem you know the solutions don’t solve.

Now that is frustrating, and will only ever breed contempt and anxiety. When we feel that we cannot change or that we are powerless to change our habits, it can cause us huge suffering.

This year, start to utilise new solutions. The old ones don’t work. So drop them.